Mommy and Rachel Day!

Today Drew had to get up really early to leave for a weekend shift in Seattle (the only thing that makes this marginally OK is he's getting about $300 in overtime pay) so Rachel and I arranged a playdate at Portland PDX with Doug, Linda, Jack and Andrew. Rachel and I got there around 11:15, around the same time as the Grayburns.

Rachel barely gave a glance back at me as she raced off to the play area, so I got to have a nice long talk with Linda and Doug. It was almost like having a grownup coffee date, except for the shrieking kids in the background. Once Rachel figured out where we were sitting, she came over once in a while to visit, then raced off again. A couple of times she asked me to come in the play structure with her, and we had a great time sliding down the incredibly steep and fast slides. I now know better than to put her on my lap and slide down together -- something about our body weights made us go extra fast, and I ended up tumbling on top of her. She laughed, but I got scared and suggested we go down together, but on separate slides.

About 1:15, most of the kids cleared out and it suddenly seemed quieter. Rachel ate a good lunch of hot dog, apples and caramel sauce, and lemonade, and toward the end of the day she begged for a cupcake. I shook my head no, she turned up her big blue eyes at me and pouted, and Linda thought she was adorable. Luckily she listened to me when I insisted she finish her hot dog -- and then she ended up wanting graham crackers instead of the cupcake! Linda wondered how I'd gotten her to change her mind; Rachel often whines for dessert and sweets and ends up leaving half of them on the plate. I think she's like me; she really just wants the taste of something sweet rather than the whole thing.

We stopped by the library on the way home to pick up a book for me to read to Rachel's class when I become HanukkahMom on Tuesday, but EVERYTHING was checked out. Either there are a lot of curious Christians in this city or the library just doesn't stock enough Judaica. I finally put one book on hold at the central library downtown, but I'm unsure of whether to get it; it's about Hanukkah in Poland, and what I really want is a preschool explanation of the holiday. Sigh.

After I put Rachel down for a nap, I spent 90 MINUTES trying to make a decent-looking menorah for Rachel's class. I made it out of blue construction paper, pasted it on a black hardboard, and am including yellow cardboard flames so the kids can "light" the menorah every night while saying the prayer I pasted on the front of the whole thing. After all the time I spent, I can only say that only one of the Lednicer sisters got the art talent in the family, and it wasn't me. I envy Valerie; she'll have the cool art mom who does awesome room projects; Rachel gets the mom whom, um, writes.

Tonight when I put her to sleep, Rachel started telling me a whole story of how she is a horse princess. She's white with a pink collar, and Daddy is a gray horse with a blue collar, and I'm a brown horse with a brown collar, and she lives in a big field, and she wears a rainbow dress and a flower dress, and she is the Horse Princess of the Flowers. She told me she'd wake me up tomorrow morning, and I told her no, please, let me wake YOU up, and she said we'd wake each other up, and hopefully I'd have enough time to get to Horse Work on time. And this paragraph doesn't sound nearly as cute as Rachel does when she tells it to me in the dark, snuggled up against me in her afghan.

Cute Rachel-isms today:

"Even when I'm a grown woman, would you and Daddy carry me around when I'm scared?" she asked in the car on the way home. I assure her we would.

***

"We need a bigger house," she said, also on the way home from Playdate PDX.
"Why do we need a bigger house, sweetie?" I asked.
"So we can have more kids," she said.
"You mean more kids in the house, or so Mommy can have more babies?" I asked.
"So Mommy can have more babies," she answered.
I sighed, and she asked me why I was sighing.
"I'd love that, too," Rachel," I said.

***
Speaking of Playdate PDX, Andrew is quite a bit older than Rachel and I've always assumed they don't interact much. He goes to real school, she goes to preschool; she's a girl, he's a boy.

So imagine my surprise that as soon as I buckled her into her carseat after we left Playdate PDX, she started singing: "Jingle bells, jingle bells/Robin laid an egg/Batmobile lost a wheel/and Joker got away."

"Where did you LEARN that?" I gasped.

"Andrew taught it to me," she said.

And here I thought she and the boys never talked...