Hugs, music, and toy cars

Romelie has a new trick. Yes, our kid does tricks, I know she's not a circus performer or a dog, I don't care, I think it's cute, deal with it. So this one was discovered on Thursday night. Romelie and I were lounging around on the bed and I said, "Romelie, can I have a hug?" She looks at me with big, wide eyes, puckers her mouth like a fish, and gives me a wet ol' kiss (she'd been drinking water, hence the wet). Apparently, she doesn't distinguish between the words "hug" and "kiss" yet but she understands the sentiment behind them both. Well, I thought it was so funny I told her to give Chason a hug when he came in the room - and she did the same thing. So now it's a trick. Be prepared if you ask for a hug.

Let's see...Romelie got to visit with some more of my family; my aunt, uncle, and cousin were in town from Florida last week. My Aunt Cheryl took a pic of Romelie and my dad and me on Father's Day that I thought was pretty darned cute. By the way, we have no daycare this week (Jen's on her one week of vacation that she takes each year), so my dad has Romelie today and tomorrow, and he's even offered to watch her overnight. For some odd reason, she's been waking up in the middle of the night the last three nights in a row (last night we ignored her and she went back to sleep quickly enough, but the other two nights we had to get up with her), so cross your fingers she sleeps well for my dad tonight.

Other news...Romelie, my mom and I went to see a play, and Romelie sat quietly through the entire thing! We saw "The Wizard of Oz" at Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins. This is good, because I got season tickets to The Children's Theatre for next year (and I wouldn't mind checking out another couple shows at Stages), so now I'm optimistic that we won't be watching the entire show from the crying booth.

I mentioned music class last week...we've started taking a class called "Family Music for Toddlers" at Musikgarten of Minnehaha Falls. It's kind of like swim lessons were, only there's no pool. But the adults sing songs and bounce the kids and jump and move around and try to get the kids to join in. Romelie's been doing a lot of dancing lately and seems to have discovered rhythm, so I think she's enjoying herself so far. We've only had one lesson; I'll keep you updated.

On an unrelated note, yesterday Romelie tried to eat a purple (washable) marker. Here is a picture of the results.

And finally, I have officially completed my first week of summer camp - and I finally made my very own invention! These two things are semi-unrelated. Summer camp last week was with 2nd and 3rd graders (most of our camps are 4th grade and up), so it was a little bit exhausting; those kids can get pretty hyper and have a tougher time following directions. But we survived and the kids made some pretty amazing inventions. Well, this week, I'm focusing on our new play and class we're developing on energy generation, conservation, and innovation which premiers a week from Monday. One of my projects was to see if I could construct a car that runs on "solar power." Honestly, that's not really possible with the solar panels we have here, so we decided to build a car that runs on a light sensor instead (shine a flashlight on the sensor and the car moves forward) but call it solar power for the show since, well, the kids won't know the difference as long as we hide the batteries. Well, ladies and gentlemen, apparently I'm more of a genius than I thought, because it totally worked! And I did it with minimal help (just needed some advice when I realized that I had made one wrong connection and it was doing the opposite of what I wanted - on in the dark, off when you shone a light...oops). So after four years of summer camp at The Bakken, I have finally completed my first invention, and it is cool. Even the campers who were here this week who are in middle school thought it was pretty impressive. AND I made it in about 2.5 hours. Think it, make it, improve it, show it! Hell yeah!