plenty of cuteness for some of us

There's nothing cuter than three year-old Lucy/Lola intoning, "Don't.. push... Lola..'cuz... she's... close... to ... the ... edge", unless she's also dancing with dramatic hands and gets it slightly wrong, chanting "Don't... push...Lola...'cuz... she's ... close... to...the...side."

Today Iris slept in until 11 (what a tiny teenager). Anton left at 4:30 a.m. to catch his flight to Chicago. Lola/Lucy and I got up, and she insisted (before I'd even had any coffee) that we were to do a project from my Preschoolers' Activity Book. For the first time, our hitherto unfailable book fucked me over. I picked making stained glass window crayons, which meant combining all our broken crayons (which I'd been saving up for some vague art project), peeling the paper off them, and baking them at 400 degrees in a greased muffin tin.

Round one: although we had generously greased the tins, the beautiful stained glass crayons would not come out. Casualty: one muffin tin. We tried again, lining another tin with tin foil. This time, I had to do most of the work, as Lola/Lucy was fed up. We succeeded in making three beautiful stained glass crayons, but somehow the molten crayon mix ate through the tin foil and adhered to the bottom of the other cups. Second round casualties: second muffin tin, slight burn to right hand, and molten wax all over kitchen sink. I tried scrubbing it out, but it wouldn't come off. I was able to chip most of it off with a knife, but still quite a lot of wax remains.

I had a dreadful sore throat all day, but I mustered us up to meet friends we hadn't seen in ages at the playground. I'm so glad I did, because the sun came out, we basked delightfully in the heat while the children played, and one friend sneaked us in a bottle of Prosecco. Other mommy/children combos we knew were there as well, and it was great right up until pissy Lola/Lucy tired of being there and commenced to whining mightily, pulling at me, and demanding to go home. I tried to talk her into going to a restaurant, but she'd have none of that, so home it was.

And at home, we had a horrendous sibling war over who could hold the rat known alternatively as "Cute Bone" and "Tinky Winky", depending upon which pissy little child you ask. We fed the vacationing neighbors' cat, and the children just wanted to rifle through the glamorous teenaged daughters' bedrooms, which I couldn't allow. The horrible keys didn't work in the locks without a huge amount of frustration and effort. On the bright side, there's strawberry cake left over from yesterday's dinner party (which was another bright point in the Drunken Housewife's life: visiting friends from Tucson over for plenty of rat rescue chat and food), and the husband's morning sucked more. He got up at 4:00 after about a grand total of three hours sleep, drove to the airport where he reported a hideously long wait for a shuttle bus from long-term parking, and such huge, horrendous lines for checking in baggage that he abandoned his pocket knife and just carried on his one bag. The poor thing was flying on the day of a huge terrorism scare, with the National Guard swarming about the airport and all coffee forbidden aboard aircraft. Heh, I enjoyed (meanly enough) thinking about that while I was basking at the park, but after a full day of squabbling siblings, I'm wanting him back.