Blackie Saves His Friend

This morning my daughter came to find me asking if I could come upstairs because she had something to show me.   I, in full-on mother mode, said I'd come right up and was the thing she had to show me that she'd cleaned up the bonus room?   It was, not unsurprisingly, the unveiling of a cleaned bonus room.   My daughter said she wasn't even aware if the bonus room was a mess and anyways didn't dad clean it up last night?

We have conversations like this frequently in our house.   I have a feeling our house is not atypical. Children have fun playing creating a byproduct of mess.  This is followed by parents saying the mess must be cleaned up.  This is further followed by a parent coming in after the children and finalizing the cleanup because children just don't get the job done completely.  

My daughter was right, her father had finished up last night and the bonus room wasn't all that bad, which was good because we had music therapy happening in there in a few hours.  With my daughter telling me she had something to show me and, "I've been working really hard on this" I wouldn't have been surprised to find a large fort with all the blankets and pillows in the house.  In this case though, what my daughter wanted me to see was in their bedroom.

I knew that's where the surprise was because my daughter had the bedroom door shut and was standing backed up against it, arms out to either side as if to block me from entering without permission.  

When I told my daughter I was ready for the surprise she slowly opened the door with a small smile on her face.   This is what I found:



She had gone through all the storage areas in the house and found chairs we'd put away because they were too small.   You can barely see it behind my daughter but she even pulled out Gramp's childhood rocker.   She'd set up seating for eight as a theater in their room.   She wanted to get a sheet hanging down from the ceiling in front of her brother's dresser for the show.  And what would she be showing?



This is Black Dog, a large plush dog with positionable legs, given to my daughter by Samantha, the daughter of our chiropractor.   Black Dog would be Blackie in the story and he was saving his friend the hedgehog, currently sitting on top of his head.

That was all I got as my daughter hadn't finished the story and would I come back later?  I said I had my camera on standby for filming whenever she's ready to start production.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I were on our own for dinner tonight.   He did not want to go out.  Not no way, not no how.   Until he thought about Crazy Fire, a Mongolian restaurant he likes.   He and I went together and he ate so much he said he was stuffed was it possible to eat so much your stomach would explode?

The Tiny Girl Chonicles:  My daughter made a blind joke the other day.   This is really a good thing.   It means she's starting to accept her blindness.   She had gotten one of those DumDum lollipops and was opening it up as we started driving away.   She knows that most of those types of lollipops have flavors but that a few of them have a wrapper with question marks meaning it's a mystery flavor.  She said, "This one's a mystery flavor, do you know why?"  I asked why and she said, "'Cause I'm blind and I can't tell."  Then she tasted it and said, "oh, it's orange, one of my favorites."