I got an e-mail text thing from my dad's cell phone this morning telling me that he and my brother are in Washington state traveling on the USS Nebraska submarine. Um, ok.
"We take a fastboat out into the Straights tomorrow to meet the boat and will travel approx 8 hours with her underway tomorrow as she makes her way back into her home port.
We would have told you but we would have had to kill you."
That's my dad.
Another day today with Dancing Girl.
We started slow with our embroidery projects. I finished my pillow, but I'll post it later.
This would have cropped to be a pretty good photo if my cat didn't have such a huge tail at this moment.

Then we started slowing down on our satin stitches. You can't do one thing for too long--so we got out the manicure stuff. She had been wanting to do this for a while...she spied the blue toenail polish I had and couldn't stop talking about it. She had only ever had pink or red polish.

This is so fun to do with little girls. It's free to do at home. Soooo luxurious.

She already understands the artistic sideways shot.

For lunch, we went to a falafel place on my street. She had never tried falafel before, and it was a hit. We brought some to Professor Lasertron at work. We all had lunch together at the hospital, and he showed her the lab.
Dancing Queen didn't finish her whole sandwich, so she wrapped it up in a piece of foil.
"that looks like a sombrero, the way you wrapped it."
"yes, this is a meat hat!"
no quiero meat hat.

"Okay, now I'll take your picture!!"


We do not really look this old. And those glasses are my useless fashion accessory, he just likes to borrow them a lot to look smart. He doesn't look quite as wise with 20/20 vision. Or as Melvin-y.
Our next trip today was coooool. We went to a big antique store downtown. I was surprised at how much fun she had in there--I'm not sure I liked antiquing that much when I was her age. I'm pretty sure I thought it was all old lady stuff. Dancing Queen was way stoked, though.
"I NEED THESE CATS!!! PLEASE!!">

"I WANT TO WEAR THIS HAT IN MY WEDDING!!!! PLEASE!!" (seriously. what.)

This booth was the coolest. It was just PURSES and JEWELRY. The WHOLE booth. We were in there for like half an hour looking at everything. I gave her a $10 dollar bill to pick something out--it was just too overwhelming. We left empty-handed. :)

This is exhausting! Sometimes I want to be like "kid, can you just sit and watch tv for a few hours?!?" She can't. Her brain is sooo hungry. While I read my e-mail this morning for 5 minutes, she was learning and pronouncing German words and phrases from my Deutsch Kinder Wortschatz (German children's dictionary). When I got up to go to the bathroom, I came back to find that she taught herself an embroidery stitch from a book she found on my shelf.
It would be really sweet to have a kid someday who is this smart, focused, engaged, funny. But so much work and energy.
