Although I did get to see the monkeys for a couple of hours on New Years day, It was not until this past Saturday that we got to spend some quality time together. We did the usual Sensory Gym session first, then headed home. Since it had been two weeks since our favorite little monkeys had any time at Daddy’s Play Palace, they set right about making up for lost time. Of course they found everything right where they had left it. It was also a bizarrely warm January day (around 70 degrees) so we had all the windows open – kind of a preview for some springtime monkeyshines.
Just a cute aside: each week, the kids run up the steps to the building and when we get to my apartment door, the kids crowd the door like runners on a starting line, rattling the knob to hurry me up with the keys. I find that I very much like the fact that they can’t wait to get in – it makes me happy that I have created a joyful environment for them.
Once the door was open (a little before noon), they both ran straight to the marble machine, which lives in the living room on visit days, so as to minimize the number of places that wayward marbles can roll under (I’ve been finding them everywhere). The machine stayed on for the entire visit (6:30pm) even though Daddy turned it off a couple of times when it seemed to not be in use.+6
This week, Daddy had thought ahead and bought some really cool hand polished and hand stained marbles at the local toy store, this way there were enough marbles for Zach to play with his marble machine and for Miranda to horde as many as she could handle. She invented a game where the marbles came to visit her dolls in the dollhouse. Zach also enjoyed integrating the marbles into his play with his fleet of cars and trucks.
It is nice to know in this day and age of battery operated everything that simple, old-fashioned toys such as marbles can still bring joy to a child. Miranda was still clutching a half dozen marbles as we said goodbye. For some reason, Miranda kept referring to the marbles as dominoes, and I finally pulled out the dominoes and labeled both the marbles and the dominoes for here. I know she understood just fine, but she gave me a look that seemed to say, “I know what they are, I just like saying ‘domino’.”
Lunch was pretty typical this week – the usual assortment of fruits, with some lima beans for Miranda (Zach ignores vegetables, even though I always put some on his plate). Instead of the everything-free rice spaghetti, I made the brown rice penne pasta that Grandma Fredi had brought when they visited. I can tell you first hand that it was pretty good, as I always eat the leftovers for my dinner on Sundays.
We also embarked on an art project this week, using our new art supplies that we got for Christmas. Sunday was Mommy’s birthday, so we made special birthday cards for her, using construction paper, markers, crayons, glue (Daddy did the work with the scissors), some sparkly balloon confetti, and our new glitter glue pens. Zach went kind of heavy on the sparkly stuff – at school they call him “glitter guy” during art class.
Zach also identified all of his shapes and colors by name – his pronunciations are getting clearer, and it is obvious that he is working very hard with his speech therapists. He also spelled (respelled actually) his name with the foam letters in the bathtub during bath-time. Bath-time eliminates any need for Daddy to ever mop his bathroom floor, because of the clean up from all the splashing and assorted hootenanny that goes on. One other new thing this week was the guitar that Daddy brought back from his trip to Boston, and both little monkeys enjoyed that hugely - especially Zach, who kept dragging it over to the couch, strumming it then covering his ears and smiling.
Parting is always such sweet sorrow, but Daddy walked with our crew (Miranda was kind of passed out by this time) the 14 blocks down to the corner where Mommy lives, where he got enough hugs and kisses to hold him over until our next installment of Monkeyshines.
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