Babysitting

At 6:45 a.m., my little buddy arrived for the day.  She was tired and not very pleased about the fact that her mom was leaving.  My teenagers would be sleeping for a few more hours, so I took Zoe on a walk to the park.  She cried most of the way.  She screamed when I put her in the baby swing.  She was not interested in learning U.S. geography:

 She perked up a bit on the way home, so we came inside and read some books and played quietly with cups until my kids woke up.

Zoe also enjoyed waving at Marty and identifying her ears (by poking her finger deep inside them).  Marty was extremely tolerant of this behavior.

I fed Zoe, and then she did what people do after they've been fed.  While I was changing her diaper, I turned around to find Sarah in this condition:

Then Sarah rocked Zoe while we had devotions and read our daily chapter of The Scarlet Letter, which did the trick, and I put her down for a nap.

During the two hours that she slept, the kids and I finished most of our school work.  She woke up before we got to our Korean lesson, so we planned to tackle that during her afternoon nap.
When she woke up, she was in a fairly jolly mood.  As I was feeding her broccoli, I was inspired to  sing my favorite broccoli song from the good old days of Saturday Night Live. Zoe seemed thrilled by the captivating lyrics:

There's a lady I know
If I didn't know her
She'd be the lady I didn't know.
My lady, she went downtown
She bought some ber-ra-ccoli
She brought it ho-ome...
She's chop'in broccoli
Chop'in brocco-li
Chop'in brocco-la
Chop'in brocco-laa-aa

 I performed it with much dramatic flair, and every time I got the line about "ber-ra-ccoli", Zoe gave me this look:

 which made me laugh out loud.  She did it every single time.  And every time I hit the high note at the end, she laughed.

After some more play time, I started the process of packing up all her stuff.  I went to break down the pack & play and fold it up.  Ten minutes later, Sarah came along, so I asked her if she could do it. She said, "Nope."  Our 11-year-old neighbor girl was here, so I asked her if she'd ever broken down a pack & play before, and she said, "No, but I can try."  We all tried.  We pushed, we pulled, we huffed and puffed, and we even resorted to reading the directions, but we were still wrestling with it when Zoe's daddy arrived to pick her up.  He folded that thing up and had it packed away in about 5 seconds. I explained to my daughter, to the neighbor, and to Zoe that we are liberated women and don't need men to do everything for us and assured them that we could have done it if only we'd had a little more time.