On Saturday the kids woke up and discovered all of the presents. Before they opened them Lydia made about fifty yummy pancakes–which lasted all weekend long. I am hoping to never flip a pancake again as long as Lydia lives with us.
Then we loaded into the car and headed to the Murdock Trail to bike, scooter, and walk together. I can’t tell if Ammon or Lydia took the selfie below, but it looks like it might have been Lydia.
On the trail it was so so hot. We went all the way to my favorite type of place–the cemetery–before turning around. Mary was totally scared to bike down the hill on the path and when I was running beside her she crashed. Abe was much more proactive about helping her not crash and as a result on the way back she inched down the hill with Abe only letting go for a few seconds at a time. It took about twenty minutes while Ammon and Lydia zipped up and down the hill and Clarissa and I waited in the shade.
On the way to and from the trail we practiced Spanish, French, German and Italian together. Lydia and I have been watching polyglot videos and she and I have started doing tutoring sessions on Verbling in addition to our Pimsleur German and Tagalog classes. While we were listening to stories in Italian and waiting for snow cones, Clarissa fell asleep. She was happy to wake up to everyone eating snow cones on the porch and we took this picture of her eating hers:
Here is a video:
Then everyone rested before reading books about blueberries and blueberry pies. Then we baked two blueberry pies.
Then we played endless rounds of Otrio. I bought it at the beginning of Covid and we had never played it until Saturday. It is basically a more complicated version of tic tac toe, and Abe and I were in absolute disbelief about how hard this game was for us. We would verbally coach ourselves to do the simplest things and we would still lose! All we had to do was keep track and make sure the person after us couldn’t Otrio and then set ourselves up to Otrio, but maybe because of the colors or pieces we could never keep track of the person after us–even when we were verbally coaching ourselves to do those two simple things. At one point Abe said, “First check Mary. Mary can not Otrio. Now check myself. Myself can not Otrio.” At this, Lydia laughed so hard she wet her pants. We were all laughing so hard. And then–Mary won!! Abe said he had never laughed so hard in a game.
After we finally went to bed, Lydia surprised us all by sleepwalking for the first time ever. She came down and had totally pleasant conversations with Abe and me, but she was clearly sleepwalking because she said things like, “I am leading with my paw,” and then after peeing asked Abe where the soap was.
“It’s right there, Lydia, in front of you.”
“No, dad. I mean the soap to wash my hair.”
At that point Abe asked Lydia if she was awake. She looked at him for a minute, smiled dazedly and said yes. Then she came in and had a conversation with me that had me wondering if she was sleepwalking too. I asked her if she wanted melatonin and when Abe ran some up to her room literally two minutes later, she was already conked out in the bed. The next day she had no memory whatsoever of these conversations so we are pretty sure she was sleepwalking.
Lydia did not know whether to be delighted or freaked out about the fact that she sleepwalked and spent the next day mulling it over trying to figure it out.