Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Waterboarding with babies.

When we found out we were going to have Lucy everyone said, "Oh, it's going to be so fun to have two close together! They'll be best friends!". I had no idea if that was going to be true or not or if this was just something people said to be polite to your face but then they really say, "Oh man, they are so screwed!" among themselves when they walk away.

Now that Penelope is two and Lucy is almost one, I suspect it's the latter because they are anything but best friends. Most days it's chaos in here now that Lucy is cruising along furniture, so close to walking on her own. Penelope doesn't want her to play with anything, must less touch it. Lucy has quite the temper and Penelope is twice as bad.

Thankfully it's "summer" in northern Wisconsin which means for one day a week it's nice enough to go outside and, if we're lucky, the girls can go in the play pool. I only have a rather small pool for the girls because when I bought it, I only had Penelope and had no plans for a fourth kid. I'm not buying another one because I know I'm not going to use it beyond the few weeks of summer that we have for Wisconsin so we're just going to make this tiny pool work.
When Olivia and Jackson were little, they played so nicely together in the pool so I just assumed Penelope and Lucy would as well. It ended up not being the case at all. You can see early on Lucy knew it wasn't going to go well for her. 
She knows from bath time that the key is to take a wide stance with her legs and brace her arms on the bottom because then Penelope can't push her all of the way down into the water. Otherwise her sister tries to drown her. You can take your eyes off the girls for even a second. She feels total joy when she's on her own and her sister is busy running through the yard.
Then she comes back and Lucy is looking for a way out.
This was after her sister dumped a large bucket of water over her head (cold water, no less) and Lucy is having none of this, is telling us all about it because we clearly did nothing to stop this. She's demanding answers.
Lucy took the toy away in retaliation and now Penelope is angry and coming to tell me about it. Apparently sitting a foot away isn't enough.

I ended up telling her to go play with Jackson because some days she's just TOO MUCH. She's a mama's girl and she's too clingy. I feel like the problem is I don't leave the house enough. But I also don't really have anywhere to go. I don't have money or anywhere really to go. Anyways.
So we brought the sprinkler out and let her run through that which was freezing cold water and she had no idea what was going on.
But if Jackson was doing it, she was all about it. She thinks he's the coolest kid ever and she's under the delusion that she's a much larger kid than she is (the clear downside to this major age gap) so she is much braver and more fearless than Olivia and Jackson ever were.

Poor Lucy though. She's going to be the toughest baby on the block only because she has Penelope for a sister. Penelope is so rough and tumble. Her latest thing is "hug time" from the movie Trolls (her absolute favorite) and she tackles Lucy in her attempt at hug time. She will tackle and do a choke hold. Lucy, for her part does her best attempt at playing dead in the hopes that hug time stops. Poor Lucy. She's such a trooper. Maybe she'll end up in the Marines or something.

1 comment:

middlechild said...

I love P. And will babysit her for as many years as you want me to!