This morning Katy came up to me with an old painting of Beth’s and made it clear that she wanted to paint too. I covered the dining table with an old sheet and let her loose. The sheet idea worked perfectly, I might get another couple of them from Vinnies so we can protect the table without having to worry about protecting the tablecloth! Clearly I didn’t pay attention in chemistry or art class in high school, though, because I put turpentine in a plastic cup to clean old brushes, which meant that we had to spend half an hour in the garden to let the smell of dissolved plastic air out of the kitchen! Fortunately the cup was in the sink at the time, so no harm done (except to my pride).

We fed the bunnies and chickens and put washing on the line. K’s fine motor control is getting much better – she always has to hang undies and small items on her little washing line when I’m putting out laundry, and she can manage to put the pegs on by herself about half the time. She heard Chiv in the garden and trotted up to the side gate to wave goodbye to them as they drove off, which was very sweet.

After we were able to come back inside, she played with the Duplo while I ‘pootered, then we went to watch the recording of this morning’s Playschool episode and discovered that it hadn’t recorded due to lack of disk space. I put on an older episode, then when that was finished, figured out how to edit some of the old shows to cut off all the extraneous Postman Pat crap. I couldn’t find a blank DVD to dub some shows onto, though. K wanted to watch another episode, so I let her do that and did some more ‘pootering and pottering. She took her nappy off again, and did a pee in the fortunately-empty-at-the-time Duplo crate (at least, I presume it was a pee, although she could have just poured some water into it, I guess).

We also played house in her kitchen: she is getting better and better at cutting up her toy food, and is starting to really move into pretend play. She was filling her cup at the sink and drinking it, also cooking at the stove and eating the results (sometimes she shared them with me *g*). We had Playground radio on in the background, and so long as I have another window open on the desktop, she is quite happy to just listen instead of insisting that she has to watch the shiny jukebox thingy the whole time! I have decided that there are worse things than the Wiggles – although I still dislike their TV show I don’t mind their music as much as a couple of pieces of crap on the playlists… One New Year’s not-resolution of mine is that we need to get more music into the house, because it’s practically criminal that someone as musically talented as Katy isn’t being immersed in it all day. I’ve been browsing the ACT Library catalogue and requesting CDs that sound interesting: currently I’m listening to Silk Road Journeys by Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, which is kind of a Western/Mongolian folk/classical fusion. Insofar as I can tell with the tinnily inadequate laptop speakers, it sounds very intriguing.

We played some more in the garden after lunch, but it’s getting too hot to be out there too long. It’s very cool having two sandpits, because even when it’s so hot that the sand in the bigger sandpit burns your feet, we can just go play in the one under the cubby house. Of course, playing under the cubby house inevitably turns Katy’s mind towards playing in the cubby house, so we did that too. Katy discovered halfway up that it is practically impossible to climb a ladder while wearing her Melbourne-Cup hat, so carefully climbed down again and took it off. After I burnt my bum on the slide on the way down I decided it was just too hot out there, so we came in again. Katy is now asleep, and I am procrastinating about deciding what we’re going to have for dinner.