Eva dinks with my phone a lot. Sometimes she messes up my settings, sometimes she calls and texts people accidentally, always she returns it with a sticky and crusty screen.
Occasionally I’ll find a treasure from her. Like this:
That’s worth a crusty phone.
It snowed yesterday. To borrow from Eva’s vocabulary:
I don’t love the snow. I grew up in the snow and I honestly didn’t mind it until I became an adult and realized that snow sucks. I’ve frozen my tongue to a flag pole, I’ve built snowmen and had snowball fights, I’ve sledded and skated down the street in my church shoes. I’m done with snow.
But Eva is not. Eva was so excited to see snow that she pulled up the blinds and sat by the window to watch it fall. I desperately didn’t want to go outside but seeing my little baby gazing optimistically out the window yanked at my heart. So I paraded into Michael’s office and told him he needed to build a snowman with his daughter. He gave me some flimsy excuses about “being on the clock,” and “having to get his work done,” and “you’ll get out of my office if you know what’s good for you, woman.” So I paraded right back out of his office and I volunteered to take Eva outside to build a snowman. That’s how much I love my girl.
Once I was into the groove, it was sort of fun. (Minus my freezing cold hands. Minus that I couldn’t bend over very well because my snow pants are tight. Minus the pile of squishy dog poo I stepped in.)
But…we built a cute little fella
Then we had hot chocolate
And tie-dyed an apron
And made cinnamon rolls
Maybe a snow day ain’t so bad after all.
But only one snow day. No more.
We have an old label maker that Eva carries around and calls her computer. It hasn’t had any label tape in it for years so she just types words on the screen and then erases them. It’s been a great way to teach her how to spell.
Michael decided to be a nice guy and bought some replacement tape for it so Eva could actually print out the words she spells. I have had the distinct honor of using my sausage fingers to pick up millions of tiny labels from off the floor; it’s hard work for my Jimmy Deans. At least Michael didn’t show her that they are actually stickers. (I promise you that man wouldn’t have any appendages left if he had hipped our daughter to that little fact.) It took Eva approximately 4 days to use up an entire cassette of labels. That’s a lot of garbage for me to pick up.
Eva spelled a lot of things with random smatterings of letters, but she also can spell actual words on her own. Here are some things that Eva can spell without any help from her doofus parents.
And naturally,
I’m so proud.
