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| Joey and Kael, having a little conversation about the merits of dinosaurs |
Ella, however, seemed to have absorbed some of their exhaustion: she lost her temper with Kael when he upended a little coffer of jewels that she'd brought along with her. I suppose it's now occurred to here that now there are two more small people around to mess with her stuff. But as much as I empathize with her somewhat obsessive tendencies, I still couldn't let her get away from it. And, once she had sufficient distance from the episode, she could admit that she was being unreasonable. I overheard her apologizing, too, to Brie: "So, um, I'm sorry about 'the episode' earlier..."
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| I can't imagine why Ella would take issue with this trio: they don't look like trouble at all! |
My kids, however, had no such good fortune. At this point, Ella was still in her sour mood, and Alex was taking advantage of sport that this offered, teasing her at every turn. In short, they were driving me nuts.
Driven by madness to inspiration, I told the kids that, as their penance, because they were fighting, they would have to hold hands for the next hour, for the duration of the trip to the grocery store that we needed to make.
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| Forced togetherness |
Initially Ella and Alex behaved just as you might expect, each squeezing the other's hand as tightly as possible. But then I reminded them that their punishment would only be as bad as they made it. That seemed to make sense to them: they were both very quiet for a moment, and then somewhat miraculously turned their moods around, giggling over the problem of trying to put on sandals with only one had a piece. By the time we were walking down the sidewalk to Migros, they were swinging their arms, with Ella was teaching Alex some of the little German songs she'd learned in school. By the time we were walking home, they decided this was "the best punishment ever."
All the same, when I finally released them they seemed to have had enough togetherness. Ella took to her room to read and draw while the boys played, more or less nicely, and I pulled together our baggage for our trip, until our friends found their way back from Google.
Dennis was finishing up a project with his group and will be starting with a new one when we return from our vacation; after tying up all his loose ends, he picked up take-out Wagamama on the way home, which meant he didn't get back until after 7:00.
But, it being summer, we've seemed to have slipped into a later schedule, and the kids didn't much seem to mind. In fact, they still had energy to spare, so I took Alex and Kael out to the little playground across the street, where Alex reveled in having a new, funny little friend to entertain. They played some made-up little game of kick-the-ball-around-and-chase-it, running flat-out for well over a half-hour. Alex was awfully cute with Kael, coaxing him along and encouraging him, reveling in having a little boy who looks up to him unquestioningly.
After dinner, since it was already late, it didn't seem to matter much if the kids stayed up a little later, especially since they'd be doing nothing but sitting in the back of a car tomorrow. And so Dennis took Ella out to play a little ping pong in the park, where they were joined by nochElla.
Brie's and Geoff's final missing car seat finally arrived, this evening, and with our bags packed, we had little left to do before we left tomorrow morning.
We did, however, acknowledge that we knew no Croatian among us, and so spent a little time looking up phrases. But the free phrase book app that I downloaded had only about 30 phrases, including "I've been shot" and "That's not my gun." That's not exactly the sort of vacation we had in mind, so we stuck to "Thank you" (hvala) and "Hello" (halo). And "beer" (pivo).
I think we're good to go.
LOVE those phrases!
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