Family let me sleep in late, oh so nice! We went out to Cafe Leila in Berkeley and had a great brunch. We had fun chatting and playing while waiting for our food. Their pancakes were impossibly fluffy “like chewing on a cloud”, Leila Omelette with sauteed spinach and mushrooms were divine, and Abigail’s breakfast burrito was pretty darn good! Then off to Target for casual shopping! I got some nice clothes and we stayed for almost 2 hours. I was actually happy that the store had remodeled, I was beginning to think that ALL stores were on their way out in favor of Amazon. At home, I got a wonderful dad nap while Megan and Abigail played. Then Abigail and I spent a good while washing her tricycle, sitting out there watching the garden grow, Abigail pay attention to the suds, and the sun shine was oh-so nice! Abigail was bent on cleaning some windows of the house so we went around to the front of the house with a bucket of water and sponges at it went well. Then it was off to a new Nepalese restaurant in the neighborhood, Zomsa that had just perfect noodle bowls and dumplings and everything else! THEN Baskin Robins! We laughed and had so much fun trading ice creams: their cotton candy ice cream is so light and cotton-candy-ish!! And their chocolate cheesecake ice cream is so chocolate cheesecakey, and mint chocolate chip so cheerfully mint chocolate chip! Hurray!
And I got to talk to my father, whom I love so much!
(this was supposed to be published After Father’s Day 2019 but didn’t make it out of my Drafts folder until June 2020, during the stay-at-home pandemic. I don’t know how the post languished in my Drafts folder for so long except to say that I spend a lot of wonderful time with my daughter Abigail! I’ll try to be more prompt about my Father’s Day posts in the future! :-) )
It is just impossible to track how much and how wonderfully Abigail is growing. So many big and little things! Here’s a couple examples:
Until about a month ago, she often made up words, throwing syllables and phonemes together with joy. I certainly encouraged her! She’d throw her body at a couch cushion, throw up her arms and proclaim “Gurumph-a-do!” She doesn’t -randomly- put together words any more. Now it’s more refined. For example, her hedgehog stuffies are named, in order of getting them: Hedgy, Baby Hedgy, and now Hedgy-Rinsterstein! Rinsterstein?! I love it!
Today, out of the blue, she told me how “drum” was an onomatopoeia and she happily banged on the dining room table describing how it sounded like the word :-)
For a long while, Abigail’s 2 favorite (only?) TV shows have been Tumble Leaf and Daniel Tiger (I totally recommend them). She always says that she needs to watch while pooping in the afternoon, a practice that Megan and I haven’t really been down with. She’ll sit on the potty forever watching unless we go fetch her. Yesterday, she said, “Mom, where is Purple (her purple tablet computer)? I have to poop.” Megan said, “You can have a book.” And amazingly, she said “Ok!” and ran off to fetch a book to keep her company in the bathroom!
We read every night. In April we started reading chapter books. We made it through the first Captain Underpants book with gusto. I started reading the new (2013) illustrated version of The Hobbit to her. She was nervous at how many pages the book had, and kept flipping through it and asking to find the part with the dragon. I told her gently that we would get there eventually as we started. By the second page she didn’t want us to stop! We made it about 25 pages over a few nights before having to take a real break but she now can tell you all about Bilbo’s hobbit hole and Gandolf and the dwarves…
Megan and Abigail went to Texas for 6 days to visit Megan’s dear friend Jane and family. When they came back a few days ago, I swear that she had grown so much in body, speech patterns, and thoughts that I barely recognized her!
We got this bathroom scale. It measures body fat, water percentage, and bone mass.
I did some research about all the different scales, in the under-$10,000 category, they are all pretty much the same, fairly inaccurate but fairly precise. That’s to say it might measure your body fat percentage incorrectly but if it goes up or down, it will track it well. This one cost $30 and works just fine.