The answer is never chips

Chocolate face.

It's been quite the weekend.

Hanna and Arya came over on Friday night in time for dinner (pizza) and bed. Arya wanted to go to sleep in Mummy and Daddy's bed, which we allowed, but she was very reluctant to settle once again. At one point I told her if she didn't stop playing with the handkerchief that covers the nightlight I was going to take it outside and set fire to it, which in retrospect was a bit extreme.

Work.

On Saturday we went to the library, which was nice, and she sat and 'did work' at the computers there. In her Supergirl costume. It was pretty adorable. We returned a bunch of books and got some back out again. She has clear favourites, which I have added to her wish list for Christmas so I can give them back to the library.

In the afternoon we went to soft play and let her have a run around. She was starting to get kind of tired and emotional by this point, however, and stuck to me like a limpet after we got home and Hanna went off to see some friends in Ely. As a result of this, we ended up eating quite late - after catching some new Sarah & Duck and generally chilling out together, which was nice, and she also had a 'nap' earlier in the afternoon, which mostly involves some quiet time with her audiobooks - and getting to bed even later. On the upside, she lay down willingly and was asleep in minutes. It turns out that she can get tired enough to sleep.

Superbike

On Sunday we had a big brunch and went to the park; again in the Supergirl costume, see picture to the left for SuperArya riding the Harley Davidson memorial. Whiel we were there, a little boy of five - he was very clear - tried to get her to engage in a swinging contest, but she was having none.

"You could swing high like me!"
"I think it's too high."

Eventually he went off, and Arya looked up from her slight, sedate rocking and said: "Daddy; push me higher!" Well played.

Then we came back for Arya's bath. She'd ducked it on Saturday by asking for a nap, so this was non-negotiable, although she almost escaped because the water was running cold. Still, with the aid of some Storybots I got her hair washed, and she is probably slightly more knowledgeable on dinosaurs and outer space (and we got to have a chat about why they say 'ow-der space,' which was... unexpected.)

Later in the afternoon, Hanna and Arya did drawing and baked a cake, and carved a pumpkin in the wake of a terrible, terrible blow up after Arya asked for a sad-faced pumpkin because she 'likes people being sad' and couldn't understand why this was upsetting for Mummy. Arya is very erudite, which I think can hide the fact that she's not always great with emotional and conceptual nuance, and she can say some worrying things. Some may be things to watch for, but others are misunderstandings, or in some cases she guesses what she thinks we want her to say if she doesn't understand us. She's also easily distracted, so Hanna decided to put all of her toys away, before asking Arya if she wanted 'toys or Mummy'.

Not sad.

Now... this is a question that probably ought not to have been asked. Of course Arya answered 'toys', because - I honestly believe - toys are a thing that you can have or not have, but Mummy is. Toys can be taken away, but the idea of Mummy not being there is alien; even absurd. When I pressed her she said that she loved Mummy more than toys and I told her to tell Mummy that, which she did. Hanna apologised and told Arya that she wasn't perfect, but Arya wasn't having it.

"You are perfect," she tearfully and vehemently insisted.

Having established that Mummy wouldn't be going, of course, she began cataloguing the 'must keep' toys, but again, that's because she's making sure to keep the thing that she could conceivably lose: things can go, but parents can't. It's like asking a grown up if they want their money or the planet. Of course they all want the planet, but if that's the answer they would have given, we'd be in a lot less of a mess than we are, environmentally speaking.

So anyway, they carved the pumpkin, which Arya drew the face for (see right) and it was glorious. It's lit with battery-powered fairy lights, for anyone worried it might set fire to the pumpkin, sofa or Arya.

The plan was for them to go after dinner - pumpkin soup, followed by pasta cheese and homemade cake with ice cream - but Arya wanted to stay, so Hanna offered a choice: Go now, or go to sleep at my place and go once she was out. She opted for the latter, and despite the impending separation, went to sleep pretty well. I think I clapped out next to her for a while, but then got up and we packed everything away and got Arya into the car and on her way back to Ipswich.

Tiredness

The pine cone has holes; it can therefore be
unlocked.

It's been another exciting weekend at Chez Ersatz, as a persistent cold has been messing with Arya's sleep cycle, and by extension her parents.

Hanna and Arya arrived on... Okay, I think it was Thursday night. Yes; Thursday night, and quite late, but Arya was awake when she arrived. I brought her in and got her to sleep pretty quickly, but she was poorly so I went in with her for the night. She was surprisingly chilled about letting me out to work, but I still came home early to look after my girls.

Friday night was heavy for... reasons, I guess. Okay, I'm going to be straight with you here; I'm pretty foggy on exactly what happened when. I know it was Saturday night when she woke up, crying out for Mummy and Daddy because she couldn't find Woody and Buzz. Now, she doesn't have a Woody or a Buzz Lightyear, so I guess we've progressed to a coherent dreaming stage of sleep, if heavily inspired by the previous evening's viewing. Actually, I think we mostly slept on Friday, but I got up early to entertain the little one before Tumble Tots. I think we reviewed the Play-Doh (pink for Mummy, teal for Daddy and purple for Arya) and... maybe watched something.

Eventually I did persuade her to get dressed.

Tumble Tots was pretty good. She was a little avant garde in her approach to some of the exercises, but that seemed to be a general thing this session (the coach looked like she was feeling she'd picked the wrong week to quit drinking as child after child reinterpreted 'stand in that hoop and throw a beanbag into the other one.') After, we went to Cambridge for a shower, only Arya decided at the eleventh hour that she didn't want a shower and instead ran up and down the corridor of my office in the altogether and tried to steal tea towels from the kitchen. We had lunch in Waitrose in Trumpington, before shopping and heading home to collapse in a sad pile of limbs. Our big achievement of the afternoon was probably introducing Arya to The Nightmare Before Christmas.

We failed to make pumpkin pie, bake anything or look in the loft, but Hanna did carve the pumpkin. Of course, having left it to Halloween we'd been lucky to get the diddy pumpkin we did find. It was literally - in the correct and non-Webster usage of the word - the last one in the shop. We watched a bit of Toy Story before bed, hence the waking up.

On Sunday we pretty much slobbed around all day and did laundry. Arya and I went shopping briefly.

"That's Daddy Andrew's yoghurt!"

In the afternoon, Arya and I made cupcakes, which is always exciting. The highlight was discovering that she can now open the latch on the sugar jar with far more accuracy than she can spoon sugar into the scale pan. All in all, the results were better than I could have hoped for as we struggled to reach a consensus about how much flour to include and whether not continuing to pour it first into a second bowl because she'd knocked the scales and I couldn't tell how much I'd already added was some sort of dire betrayal.

We ate the cupcakes with ice cream instead of icing, which should tell you something about how well we were doing.

We also watched a lot of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which is surprisingly watchable. I have the song 'Hearts Strong as Horses' stuck in my brain now.

Hanna and Arya left on Sunday evening, which is always a recipe for missing them especially badly. This is made worse by the fact that I'm off at a game next weekend, so I won't see them for a couple of weeks.

This is Hallowe'en

Arya is spending Hallowe'en (or rather Samhain) at the other house; I will not be in attendance as I am neither a pagan nor a drinker, and thus fail to qualify for most of the planned activites, and because I have a dental appointment at 9.30 the next day.

I had a plan for a Hallowe'en costume for me and Arya, but I doubt I would have had the patience to paint myself as a tree, even if I had managed to persuade her into a raccoon costume and arm her with Mummy's Nerf guns.

Hannah asked about Hallowe'en costumes last night. Specifically she asked 'what do Cthulhu cultists wear'? I think the answer is pretty much what anyone else wears. Or robes. I then tried to find a pattern of the yellow sign for her new embroidery machine; I failed. Again, the costume would likely have fallen down on the basis that she wouldn't have stomached wearing a mask, let alone learning to claim not to be if asked to take it off.

I am glad to think that she will probably never have to wear a shop bought costume, since I can't bear the thought of my little girl wearing one of those godawful 'monster/children's fiction character/serious professional, if they were a shameless whore' costumes that seem to be all that they sell for girls over the age of fifteen. I want her to wear awesome costumes and be awesome.

Also, she has to stay at least six inches from boys at all times, and discreet barbs sewn lovingly into her costumes are a good way to maintain this.

Commercial Hallowe'en costumes bring out the angry dad in me. I'd act surprised, but they have done since before I was a dad.