...a little wave: hot saturday!

as i've mentioned before, saturdays are daddy-bebe days. mommy takes the day to do schoolwork, so we usually make plans to go out somewhere and do something until lunch/nap time. one of our routines has become a trip on the orange train downtown, a walk across the common to the duck pond where we have a snack, and then up one of the busier streets to the train station before riding back home for lunch. i've got a couple of saturdays' worth of entries so i thought i'd take this week to showcase some of the daddy-daughter time we spend together. i'm starting off with a few new posts, chronologically speaking, and towards the end of the week i have some older posts that for whatever reasons didn't make it up here at the time.

up first is this trip, from the weekend before last:

one of the really great things about bebe being two is that she's now old enough to actually give a crap as to how we spend our time together. she has ideas about where she'd like to go, the things she'd like to see, etc. i try to give her a couple different options, and i usually offer destinations other than "the big playground," "the little playground," or "the tot lot." she spends a good part of her week at these places, and i feel like it's part of my responsibility as a parent to continuously expose her to new things. that, and i effing hate the playgrounds. but i'm sure you already knew that about me.

of course, i want her to have fun and if she's really pushing for a playground, i'll cave and deal with it. fortunately, she requests them less and less. trips on the train seem to be her favorite right now.

we take the orange train exclusively, though it's a goal of ours to try out each line. next up is the green line, and after that maybe the red line. we'd like to work in a bus at some point too. as we've taken more trips on the train, beebs has become more comfortable with it. it can be loud and bumpy at times, and she spent the first couple of rides in my lap. now she's like an old pro- she asks for (demands) her own seat, and routinely says "hi" and "bye" to passengers as they come and go.

and you don't get to see stuff like this at the tot lot!

when we got off at the china town stop, we came out to some heavy construction going on:

there was a crane raising pallets of supplies to workers on the roof of this building!

we watched as a man on the ground loaded up the building materials

so that the crane could take them all the way up to the top!

there was also a dump truck, and a digger that was filling it up with dirt!

when i finally was able to pry her eyes from the construction, we turned a corner and found another crane! WHAT ARE THE ODDS, PEOPLE?!?!?!

bebe's favorite thing to do as we cross the common is to ghost-ride the whip. it's basically just when she pushes it, and from the front it looks like it's rolling on its own. i try to hang back a bit to promote the "illusion," and it's fun to watch people's expressions when they see it slowly but steadily creeping towards them, changing direction ever so slightly, and occasionally singing in hebrew. that's my little lady.

"SHALOM! HAH-VAYYYYYYY REEEEEEEVE!"

once we get to the duck pond, lady likes to give the chains a nice, thorough swing.

she swings them for a little while, then proclaims "makes. funny. noise." she's one of the few people i know who speaks in single-word sentences. okay, the only one i know. but it really works for her.

"perhaps. i. should. run. you. over. daddy."
please don't.

when we make it to the far side of the pond, there are a couple benches we sit on for snack time.

it's a nice, quiet, shady spot

...perfect for snuggles!

and then after we're done snacking, we can hop off and right behind us is this big expanse of lawn!

perfect for running

picking clover

and pretending to fall asleep. what a little cut-up.

on our way back to the orange train, we walk across copley square. this was a particularly hot day, so i had a surprise in store for the beebs.

"let's play hide-and-seek. you close your eyes and count to ten, and i'll hide!"
uh, okay.

1,2,3,5,9,8,10!

(bebe taught me how to count.)

(slightly muffled)

"okay! try and find me!"

hmm. where oh where could she be?

"SURPRISE!!!"

hey- speaking of surprises:

between stops on the train is this cool water fountain/spray-park thingee. i though it would be fun to cool off before lunch. it was already ninety-one degrees and it wasn't even noon!

bebe's nothing if not cautious.

she saw big kids running around in it, and that kind of built up her courage to check it out.

yeah. those pretty much speak for themselves.

there's a cool reflecting pool too! bebe would run back and forth between the two, squealing her little head off, much to the delight of anyone within earshot. which was pretty much everyone.