LRB Day - February 5, 2025

Yesterday, I babysat the Little Rotten Baby for a few hours.  

Her little curly-headed self strutted in about noon, carrying a bag of Cheetos and a travel mug full of sweet tea.  About the first thing she said to me was, "I'm gonna need you to get my horse."  She was talking about the big wooden rocking horse that my father-in-law built for Granddaughter #1's first Christmas, nearly 20 years ago.  Every grandchild in the family has claimed it for a time.  It weighs about 30 pounds and cannot be moved without mashing a toe or bruising a shin.  I wrestled it from the spare bedroom to the living room, and she climbed on and began issuing other directives.  

When she tired of the rocking horse, we worked a jigsaw puzzle, read some books, and drew "talky faces" on our thumbs and index fingers.  Eventually, she ventured into the kitchen and spied the wooden carvings on the table.  She brought one to me and said, "I need to paint this."  

She paints with watercolors every time she comes over, but I hadn't yet let her get into the acrylic paints.  I almost said "no."  All of the little figures lacked fine detail work, and I wanted to finish them before painting them.  

On the other hand, they're all pretty crappy, and what would I do with them, anyway?

So I got out the acrylic paints, stripped the LRB down to her drawers (so she wouldn't get paint on her clothes), and gave her the owl, my first carving, the worst of the lot.  

The paints she picked out were not very owlish - pink, seafoam green, robin's egg blue, and purple.  I did not discourage her color choices, but I did show her pictures of real owls and played some hoots for her.  She started with pink and made her way through the rest of the colors, and so for a while her owl was a rainbow, but he was 100% purple when she took him home.