Pool day

This morning we did some school work while Auntie K went grocery shopping for herself. She has celiac disease and...so we let her be in charge of what she eats. She made shepherd's pie for dinner this evening (for all of us), for example (and it was delicious). 

After lunch we headed to the pool. It's a bit cooler than we're used to, but as the afternoon warmed up it felt better and better. We had a lot of fun playing catch and "piggy in the middle," which my kids all call "monkey in the middle," despite my best efforts to make them adopt my way of speaking. There are many names for the game. 

Here we are the first few minutes at the pool, getting used to the water:

After swimming, Auntie K took the kids to the grocery store to pick up a couple of things she'd forgotten (or hadn't been able to find) in the morning and she let them sneak around putting googly eyes on things and then hiding them for other people to find later:

They got stranded in the parking lot for a little while, but eventually made it home—with ice cream in tow! Phoebe, who was rather shy when Auntie K first arrived, has really warmed up to her today. I think the ice cream helped.

However, I had to feel pretty good when it came time for bedtime stories and Auntie K volunteer to read Phoebe some books. Phoebe first grabbed some family photo albums (she loves looking at those, even though she's not in many of them), and Auntie K thumbed through them with her. And then she started reading The Ghosts Went Floating and Phoebe was like, "No thanks. My mom really has the best tune for this book. Actually...my mom has the best tune for all these books. So I'm just gonna..." 

And she brought the books over to me and made me read them to her. 

I sure love that girl, even though she announced that her favourite part of the day was "sneaking onto the iPad." And even though she only did that because she didn't know what to do because everyone was busy...even though I'd specifically asked her to put away her clean laundry. But she just "didn't know!"

This morning when I woke her up (in my bed, naturally) I said, "Come on, sleepy head—it's time to get up!"

She turned and burrowed into me and said, "Snuggle for seventy minutes?"

What could be sweeter than that?