Panda snacks, Saturday jobs, and Austenland

"Look what someone left in the snack box for me!" Phoebe ran into my room overflowing with excitement.

She'd found a package of "panda" cookies. Alexander had found a pack of them a couple of days ago and Phoebe wanted one as well, but couldn't find one. She was pretty upset (read: devastated) about the lack of panda cookies in our house, and she had only encountered Alexander when he was popping the last one into his mouth so he couldn't even share with her.

"How do you know someone left it for you?" I asked.

"Because they labeled it for Phoebe! Who even could have done this? It's so nice!"

"Ah, that looks like Zoë's handwriting. That was so nice of her to reserve that treat for you!"

"Yes, it was! It was so nice!"

Zoë spent two hours listening to audio books and deep cleaning the kitchen yesterday, which included organizing the shelf of snacks and cereals. That was so nice! She also did her "Saturday job," which was to clean and vacuum what we call the "main room" downstairs, so that it would be clean for Miriam's game night last night (Miriam took Benjamin to swim practice so she wasn't home to prep for the gathering herself). 

Alexander thought that it was rather wise of Zoë to do her Saturday job on Friday evening—that way she wouldn't have anything she had to do on Saturday morning. She would be free! Genius!

So he decided to do his Saturday job on Friday evening as well. 

The two of them got up this morning and played games in the basement—I saw Mantis was out, along with some face cards (indicating that they likely had played Speed), and they were actively playing a game of chess—in spite of Zoë staying up late last night.

She'd been wanting to watch Austenland since Rachel, Miriam, and I watched it this summer...and Zoë sneaked out of bed to watch quite a bit of it from the stairs...and I had promised her that we could watch it together. So last night we finally did. 

She said it was much better to watch the whole thing from start to finish, snuggled up on the couch, with a bowl of popcorn, than it was to watch bits and pieces of it skulking on the staircase. Go figure.