All grown up

We had another quiet day at the Geels household: Alex came home from school and pulled a stack of board games off the bookcase and presented them to me.  Joey wouldn't be left out, and, amazingly, patiently sat through an hour and a half of rolling dice and moving his pieces around the board. As long as he's in the orbit of his older brother, MeToo will endure anything.  Actually, he enjoyed it: he trounced us both in Monopoly, which Alex thought was very funny, referring to Joey as "Old Moneybags" for the rest of the afternoon.

After all that sitting, the boys were more than ready to run outside and play by the time Ella came home from school.  This morning the store had their summer toys on sale, so I picked up hula hoops for Ella and Alex.  It took Ella all of a minute to get hers stuck in one of the trees, and so her next hour's entertainment   consisted of coming up with harebrained schemes to get the hoop down.  

It was an excellent means for meeting the neighbors, it turned out: there are several stay-at-home dads that I know of in the neighborhood, and every one of them stopped by and offered suggestions to Ella.  She mainly stuck with the brute force method, trying to knock the hoop out with Joey's ball and Alex's hoop, getting both stuck in the tree as well.  You can imagine the indignation that followed.  

Time for mom to get involved: Alex was lifted into the air to get his hoop, Joey's ball was knocked out of the tree with a rock, and we pulled Ella's hoop down after looping it with a block tied to a piece of string, to the applause of our spectators.

With the kids self-sufficient again, I was curled up on the ground, watching them, when a group walked by.  "Hello," one called, and when I answered, he nodded, satisfied, to his friends, "See! I told you she was an American. A Swiss person would never smile at people like that."  Note to self: if I ever decide to become an international spy, I must first work on my composure.

As the kids were chalking, Ella's new friend (Ella2) from school rolled past on her scooter and stopped to play.  I found her just charming.  She told me that her mother sometimes gives her pocket money to buy candy, and she asked, very earnestly, if Ella could be allowed to walk with her all the way to the corner candy stand at the train station.  

Do you remember when the absolute pinnacle of freedom was being given a dollar to buy candy all by yourself? Although I was much older, because Fox Drugs was over a mile from home. It was an epic bicycle journey.

Ella2 (whose parents are Swiss, and so she speaks Swiss German) also told me that she thinks everyone is a bit nicer to her than they are to my Ella.  "They keep scolding her to speak German, and she tries really, really hard, and works really hard, too. And I think they should help her out more and maybe help her with a little English sometimes." 

So Ella really needed and enjoyed the hour she spent with her new friend, drawing a hopscotch board that stretched the length of our sidewalk.