Eagles vs. Cowboys!!!

I’d been looking forward to this game all week.   Out of town riding all weekend and I was primed for some balling!   Took a half day of work so I could get in a lift and some chores and get home with t.Human just in time to set the tivo on both TVs. 5:30pm is a challenge for a west coast fan!

Beckie was not going to be home til about 8, and I owed her and G some G-time after being away all weekend. The trick was going to be taking care of Genevieve and still getting to enjoy the flow of the game. When I tivo games its hard to maintain the tension and the drama of watching it live, and as I am more easily and willingly interrupted, I lose the flow even more. Mix in one tinyHuman, and this posed a problem that would require careful game planning, clock management, and personnel skills – as a veteran heckler and drinker in this league, there was no place for excuses, guys needed to step up!

The first quarter G ate, so we watched in the pool room together. And vacuumed up all the pork fried rice that she and Kila left on the floor. After about 5 minutes of digestion, and 5 minutes of self-distraction on the porch, she was ready to enter the game. We did some laps around the house, timed perfectly to coincide with TV-timeouts and commercials. But eventually G got wise to how we kept ending up in the Pool room, but all her stuffed animals were still scattered on the bed. We played a brief but intense games of 12347 on the bed, followed by more laps around the house – these worked for awhile until she again got frustrated with the interruptions to her plays. The irony…

Finally I paused both TVs for a marathon session of running, wrestling, tuggy and tickling. She started calling for the Laughing Game, something she must have picked up at daycare.

The game wore on, G needed a sub, and we spent the second half of the 2nd quarter sitting on the barstools. A bath at halftime, and finally she chilled watching her shows while I watched the 2nd half.

Its not quite fun for the whole family, but it worked out pretty well for the whole team (except Kila, who got screwed out of a run; laps around the house get dull for the dog after about 6 of them). I taught G to shout “YEAH EAGLES!!!!” She’s a big fan of the jumping up and down and celebrating part.

I looked in G’s shoe drawer today, and found only the leftovers and unwanted weird shoes that don’t fit or aren’t practical or she doesn’t like. This is not new. G loves to take out shoes, then leave them randomly around the house.

Except there were no shoes left around the house.

I said “where are your shoes?” And she quickly walked me down the hall to the gear room where her most popular shoes were stacked tidily on our shoe rack.

G remembering details is still new enough to me that it takes me by surprise. Where is the line between habit, long-term memory, and short-term memory? Her seatbelt is a habit; Kila is a long-term memory; the shoes on the shoe rack just happened over the weekend!!!

Its getting a lot harder to fool her into submission – she knows when I say “let’s get clean” but get into the shower that she is screwed and is going to have to get a shower instead of a bubble-bath. She doesn’t need to see the hairbrush to know that the last thing we do when getting dressed is pull the knots out of her hair. She knows our parking spot a quarter mile from the park means its time to nag me into carrying her.

In some ways this advanced comprehension makes her easier to reason with – she remembers it takes time to make breakfast so she is willing to wait (as long as she sees me promptly cracking and stirring eggs at a frantic pace).     And sometimes she solves her own problems – yesterday we needed to get Kila a tuggy-toy so she would stop gnawing on G’s pet parrot while we were chasing each other around the house.   G led me to her room and we quickly found the tuggy in her toybox.

Could have been a lucky guess, a lot of crap ends up in that toybox?