daddy saturdays PT 2

this saturdaydaddyday is from just last weekend. once again, it was a hot one, and once again, we were headed downtown to see what we could see.

this kid, in spite of the heat, is one cool cucumber.

sitting in her own seat, just like the big girl that she is. this morning she sang almost all the words to "rock-a-bye baby" and when mommy pointed this out to her she said it was because she was two now. it's true, she's two.


wouldn't you know, our lucky china town stop provided:

not one

but TWO diggers, doing some serious mess-making. there was a big dump truck and we sat for about fifteen minutes watching them tear up the sidewalk.

and while we watched the diggers, we saw an ambulance and a bunch of city buses!

down by the common we came across this pretty bed of flowers.

i pointed out to bebe that the flowers on her sundress were the same color as the flowers in the flowerbed.

she was awfully pleased to be so coordinated.



puddles on our walks are always a bonus:

she's very nonchalant.



we stopped at our usual bench for our usual snack:

watched some swan boats go by

...contemplated the general meaning of life, the universe, and everything

...and watched some little birds take a bath in a puddle. don't get any ideas, beatrix marie.

she's got skinned knees on top of skinned knees! she's a real trooper though. she just dusts off and gets right back to it, whatever 'it' may be.

aside from pretending to fall asleep in the stroller (her favorite gag), she loves to put her sunglasses on upside down. sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes not. but it's always funny!

wtf?!? a mini crane doing construction on the lamp posts?

could this day get any cooler?

throw in a man in a bucket, and the answer is 'yes!'

"three. fingers. in. nose?"
no, beebs. one per nostril. sorry. pernostril sounds like one of those enlarged prostate medications. try pernostril, it'll help. just saying.



while we were waiting for the orange (or, onaj) train, bebe tried the 'ol 'putting the sunglasses on upside down' routine.

only this time, i was ready for her, and promptly tipped the stroller back, inverting the beebs, but, uh, verting? sure, why not- verting the sunglasses. i verted them. pernostril.

it took forever for our train to come, and this poor kid's head just filled and filled with blood.



eventually it got too heavy to hold her like that, big blood-filled head and all, so i righted her.

"i feel funny. but i can see stars and stuff. it's cool."

caught in the act of "pretending" to sleep. what a card!



after dinner, bebe was bouncing off the walls, so mommy suggested (pleaded is probably a better word) for us to head out again to burn off some of that energy before bed time.

we went for a walk in the garden across from our house. bebe found a bebe-sized stool and made excellent use of it.



none of the vegetables were quite ripe, though we saw some smallish eggplant and lots of green tomatoes, and there were tons of flowers in bloom all around us.

on the way out of the garden, bebe got really into drawing in the dirt.

not sure what she was working on, but she insisted on stopping every few feet to make some marks before moving on.



after the garden, we headed over to the little play ground.

it was almost eight o'clock, so we had the entire place to ourselves. we did some bike riding,

gassed up the lawn-mower and did some mowing,

and sliding,

and some climbing on the climbing wall.



both climbing walls, in fact:

you've never seen such a careful little pair of pink sneakers before.

"help?"

she made me some guacamole (a specialty of hers).

and when she cleans the oven, she really gets in there and cleans the oven!

this was probably the most time the two of us had spent together, just the two of us, in one day. it was great. at two, beatrix is the perfect playmate: she can run and jump and splash, she can yell and sing, she can carry on conversations, and she still thinks it's funny to put your fingers up your nose! it doesn't get much better than that...

summer corn-on-the-cob!

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.

and nothing beats splashing in a puddle! she was starting to attract a crowd of on-lookers. i was feeling like the secret service.

one last trip back to the fountain.

getting soaked is hard work! how was it beebs?

"awesome!!!"

alright! home for lunch and a nap!