Sunday afternoon

We had a busy few days around here, with Valentine's Day and all. Friday night S and I took advantage of the free childcare offered by a local church and went out to eat while the kids attended a "party" at the church. Then Saturday night we went over to a friend's house for a potluck and singing. There were about a dozen families crowded in there, and we had a pleasant evening sitting on the living room floor singing what S calls "hippie songs" (didn't know "You Are My Sunshine" and "Baby Beluga" qualified, but ok) while a long line of little kids kept passing through on their way upstairs or down into the basement. Always on some urgent mission -- first they were detectives, then they were fairy-hunters.

Then Sunday morning we were at church all morning, between Mass and family famith formation. So the afternoon was a little bit lazy.

This picture is of S reading a long book called "Big Susan" to the kids. The book is about a little girl named Susan and the dolls in her dollhouse. It is told from the dolls' perspective, hence the title: Susan seems very big to the dolls, so big, in fact, that they can never see all of her at once. The dolls rely on Susan for everything, except from midnight to dawn on Christmas morning, when they can talk and move on their own. The story is obviously a light allegory; part of the "Wonderful Night" involves an encounter with "someone even bigger than Big Susan, someone even gentler than Big Susan, who smelled faintly of flowers rather than toothpaste."

In any case, the story inspired renewed attention to the dollhouse the kids received from their grandparents at Christmas, and B and M played with it for the rest of the afternoon, and M and J have been playing with it for much of today as well. M even made plates for them from pennies, and put shavings of carrots on the plates to be "orange celery."