More than an earful

I realized, belatedly, that I should have just dived right into dissecting the radness that is The Cabin in the Woods yesterday, because it was Geek-Out Wednesday and all. Then I could have led today, Offspring Update Thursday, with the bit about the roving Hello Kitty balloon and then segued right back into Cabin again from there. Ah, hindsight. So for my own arbitrary aesthetic-organizational reasons I will delay further discussion of Whedon and Goddard’s instant classic until tomorrow, and give today over solely to my children.

And they are … good? Pretty good. The little girl continues to struggle with ear infections but I am fervently hoping that the end is in sight. It seems a near-certainty she will get tubes surgically inserted in her ears sooner rather than later, it’s just a question of when (barring a sudden and miraculous change in the overall healthfulness of those beleaguered little bits of her). And on the other hand, the list of ill humours circulating through her daycare center has been not just reduced but taken down completely, which means (possibly, hopefully) fewer sources of infection to begin with. We shall see.

Also did I mention that she has transitioned from the younger infant room to the older infant room? She seems to be enjoying the new environs, and the major impact on me is that I no longer need to put on booties or take off my shoes to enter the room where I pick her up. I admit the increased convenience is nice, even as it’s another one of those things where now that I don’t have to do it for her, it’s one of those things I’ll likely never have to do again at all, because we’re pretty sure we’ve reached the end of the child-producing phase.

At any rate, the little guy continues to dote on his baby sister in charmingly weird ways. Yesterday I carried her into his daycare room, where all of the children were gathered around the teacher for storytime. I waited until the book was finished before even trying to extricate the little guy, at which point he was open to the idea even as the other children were lobbying to be read a second story. The little guy interrupted their various inquiries to ask, “Um, do you guys want to come and see the baby? Because you can, if you want.” So he’s proud of showing her off, and that is sweet. He also likes playing with her, even if he still has a hard time grasping what is an appropriate level of physical play for a one-year-old. As much fun as a washcloth tug-of-war can be (for both of them, as it succeeds wildly in giving little guy and little girl both the giggles) it’s a bit dangerous in a bathtub full of water when the older sibling is more than capable of yanking the younger right onto her face and into a drowning hazard. Clearly parental supervision is still a crucial need around these parts.

But yeah, even testing their unevenly matched strength against one another in the face of deadly danger, they are just cute and sweet and good and I’m grateful for them. Make no mistake, the morning after I saw Cabin in the Woods I looked my son in the eye and told him in no uncertain terms that if her ever finds an old diary describing scary awful things, he is emphatically NOT to read any Latin post-scripts aloud. I figured such a warning would go in one of my daughter’s germ-catchers and out the other, so I settled for some extra-fierce hugging at bedtime instead.