Okay, a few recent posts lacked some further documentation. 1) The shopping trip on the weekend usually involves a continuous trip from New Seasons to Trader Joe's, a fine establishment where Ida's friend Pat (who saved Baby Matthew during the kidnap situation) works. Lately they have these little tiny shopping carts, which are a true nightmare and can extend a fifteen minute shopping trip into an hour and a half. Baby Matthew is in there, of course, and she has to be covered up just so ("get the edges!") with the Carrot Blanket:
There are often tasty samples. Ida has 2-3, at least:
So many delicious opportunities...
And then, finally, back out to the car:
2) The Cat Stevens/Yusuf fixation continues, and spreads. One of the ways I can buy five minutes in the morning (questionable parenting perhaps, even if it will yield peace on Earth, thanks to Allah) is to allow a little video watching.
As you can tell, not only has Miki caught the fascination, but the music of Yusuf/Cat brings the sisters closer...
As part of a child-rearing experiment too esoteric and experimental to go into, I began to expose Ida and Miki to large doses of the music of Cat Stevens*. This has been more popular than I had expected, especially on Ida's part. While she will still request the "Greatest American Hero" theme song ("Believe it or Not!"), she is mostly about Cat. Or, as he is now known, Yusuf.
Then I made the questionable decision to check it all out on youtube:
"What's Cat Steven's cat's name?" Ida asks.
Her favorite song is "Where Do the Children Play"; she calls it "Jumbo Planes," however.
"The curtain went up! All his friends were behind there!"
"Baby Matthew likes Cat Stevens, he's her guy; Yusuf is my guy...but I like Cat Stevens."
"That's his friend, playing the contar! Go back to Yusuf. I like Yusuf. I like the way he looks. Good."
(*if one were to listen to Cat Stevens's "Gold," you'd realize, as we have, that he wrote pretty much all of the songs, including those attributed to the Beatles, in the twentieth century. Unbelievable.)
Today we went and procured some pumpkins at a pumpkin patch down south; we saw some chickens, went on a hayride, and saw pumpkins shot out of a cannon. None of this was captured on film; sometimes it's nice to be living, you know, rather than documenting "life." Anyway, Reed College gave me a new computer not long ago and now I have the capability of taking pictures and making videos from the iSight camera, which is a tiny hole atop the screen. This thing could keep Miki entertained for hours, except she drools all over the keyboard.
