This morning Abigail decided that she wanted to eat her snack while standing on her head. She had a little tray of puffs on the floor, so naturally she stood up, balanced her head against the floor with her bottom in the air, and carefully tipped the dish into her mouth with her free hands. When she got tired of that she retreated into her box and tried feeding the puffs to one of her stuffed animals, a bright orange cat that is so round that she alternates between calling it Cat and calling it Ball. But I had fun watching her press pieces of cereal against its sewn-on mouth before placing them into her own. Sometimes to get her to eat a little more, I pour portions of her snack into different sizes and shapes of containers, such as a dump truck, a shoe box, and a plastic egg. She can sometimes successfully pour them from one to the other, though as always, her favorite method of getting them out is to shake the receptacle wildly until everything goes flying. The truck, she has discovered, doesn’t necessarily need to be shaken to get a spectacular spill. All it really needs is a good crash into a solid object. Kewwwwl.

She was whiny this morning while I was getting the dishes done, so I tried to placate her with a bowl full of suds to play with. She sat at my feet saying, “Bub- bub- bub- bub-bubbles” and amassing mountains of suds on her hands. Then she realized that she didn’t know how to get the bubbles off, and panicked. She tried shaking, but it didn’t really work. She tried crawling away really fast, and that didn’t work either. These were some tenacious bubbles! She resorted to crying and I swooped in with a towel and showed her how to wipe them off. Sweet relief! I guess she doesn’t like having weird things stuck to her hands. I tried to do a science experiment with her yesterday that threw her into a horrible mood that lasted the whole of the afternoon. We sat on the floor with a mixing bowl of dry flour. She put her hands in once or twice, but didn’t enjoy it. Then she bumped the bowl so some of the flour sprinkled onto her foot– oh, the horror! I brought down a few different containers of water, thinking she might enjoy feeling the flour as it changed consistency with the addition of liquid. She enjoyed drinking the water and pouring it on herself and the floor, and, surprisingly successfully, into another container, but she did not enjoy pouring it into the flour. The stickier the flour and my hands got, the more she fussed. I made a smooth, elastic dough ball and she refused to hold it. She just clung to the side of me that was farthest from the bowl and whined until I had cleaned up the mess. It is hard to clean a 3 x 3 foot area of water, flour and dough, especially with a small child clinging to one, so it took some time and I got quite an earful all the while. Sorry, baby girl! We’ll have more fun next time.