The wheels on the bus

I went in to get Beth up yesterday morning and found her sitting in her crib, back against the side, legs stretched out in front of her, with her blanket and dolly Annabelle sitting in her lap.

"Mommy! I'm riding on bus!"

My super-literal child's little imagination has finally kicked in — and it's a wonderful thing to watch. She's starting to play with Play-Doh (which usually means picking apart a ball of the stuff or having Mommy make something for her), she wants me to make her a blanket tent in her room (where she'll sit for, like, half an hour with her dolls and books), and she's having good little conversations with her dolls when she goes to bed at night (Scott encourages this when he puts her to bed: "Can you tell Annabelle and Baby Margie what you did today?"). She's building some new skills, too: besides the potty endeavors, she's learned to put on her own shoes — as long as they're slip-ons like her "skate-rat shoes" (the Vans my sister gave her for her birthday) or her rain boots (which she insisted on wearing yesterday and had on her feet while she was still in just a diaper and tee shirt). During my Saturday cleaning mini-frenzy she helped me wash out the bathroom sink. Took her job very seriously, too.

Thanks to my friend Brooke, I'm also flexing the imagination muscle and learning some new skills: she had the terrific idea of getting a group together to make our own quiet books for our kids, and we've come up with this fabulous Pittsburgh-themed book: all the things a little kid can do in Pittsburgh. We have three pages done now: sort the fruits and veggies into the right colored bin at Stan's Market, zip Mr. Rogers' sweater, dig for dinosaur bones (and assemble the dinosaur) at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. More to follow. Mine will be the carousel at Schenley Plaza (move the animals up and down the poles on the carousel) and a button-the-wheels, open-the-door-and-see-the-driver Port Authority bus page. Beth loves the Stan's Market page (she hasn't seen the other two yet) and will contentedly sit at the dining room table taking the little felt pieces off and Velcroing them back into the right place. Somehow I've become the resident sewing expert for the quiet book group, which makes me laugh — taking sewing in high school was one of the ways I kept sane, but it's been, like, 17 years! I'm having inordinate amounts of fun, though.