Ersatz Lite

"Arya; are you a supervillain?"

It was a short weekend with Arya and Hanna this time out. They arrived from Nottingham late on Saturday, and we spent Sunday in Norfolk with my parents.

Arya was super tired after sleeping away from home for a couple of days, and was yawning and overreacting to things from the get-go. It was a bit of a struggle to get her out of the house on time, but we made it, and drove out to t'Mill for the day. She did pretty well with her potatoes and chicken, but left most of her other veg, before settling in to play.

She played hide and seek with Granny, set up the puzzle cars to run into as many bollards as possible and then built a train track with houses at the end of the line for the train to run into, all the while repeating 'chugga-chugga choo-choo' to herself. Apparently she has some sort of dark design to be the overlord of Chugginton or something.

We also played several rounds of 'Go, Go Dragons', and established that there is a point at which a dragon can no longer finish at all, and that it is pretty easily reached. In one game, this hard limit caught two of the dragons. On the other hand, I think everyone got to win at least once, although in the other games my dad got pretty unlucky, and my mum was cheated of a victory when Arya switched my card for Mum's on a whim.

This game is called 'get the ball into the
tree'.

After that, there was some playing with the ball. It's an old green and white ball, frankly filthy, but which has provided hours of delight to many children of the family. We threw it back and forth a bit and then Arya decided to try to throw it into the tree. I wonder in retrospect if she were trying to recreate scenes from In the Night Garden, in which the Ball represents chaos, ruin, entropy and the inevitability of oblivion.

At the eleventh hour, Arya got difficult. As tiredness overwhelmed her, she refused to try to use the toilet, and asked to explain told me: "It just makes everything worse, okay darling?" Where she got this killer argument from, I do not know, but I will be listening out for that phrasing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Arya fell asleep in the car; about ten minutes into the drive, in fact, although after eating some more chicken and a banana (because when I say unsurprisingly, I mean I brought food in case she dropped off before we got home.)

She slept the sleep of the just, but was still pretty tired this morning, so getting her into the car was exciting. Hopefully a few more good nights will follow, as I'm soloing her this weekend. I imagine we'll either bond like nobody's business or drive each other crazy.