One of Those Tuesdays

River likes to watch a cartoon called Kai-Lan, which is about a Chinese-American girl. This morning he watched some episodes while Violet was having her mega-nursing-growth-spurt-nap, and when I came out he asked me how to write the word "love" in Chinese. River's Chinese vocabulary certainly exceeds mine at this point, but today we both learned something new (the word sounds just like the English "I" or "eye", and the character contains the character for "heart").

River also asked me to make a crocodile out of folded paper, which I'm pretty sure he picked up from the origami documentary that we watched the other night. We looked it up, and managed to construct a simple version - hooray for the internet!

Then we read his new whale book twice. This book is one of the longest he has, and we've read it probably twenty times since he got it last Thursday. Sea animals are a topic of sustained interest around here.

When Violet woke up, we walked to the playground for our first major outdoor expedition of the year. River volunteered to push Violet on the swings, which amused both of them for a really long time. Then River and I raced around the playground for a while while Violet tried to figure out why she couldn't walk up a slide.

River has had a ton of manic energy these days, so we followed up the playground with a rousing round of "bed games" - a combination of mostly pillow-fighting, wrestling and hide-and-seek invented to let off some steam in the house.
 
This evening, after grocery shopping (at Whole Foods, where River likes to push his own little cart), he asked me who makes legos. We watched some short videos about factories making legos, cars and boats, then followed it up by building a lego castle.

After James gave the kids their bath and I put Violet to sleep, we had a little quiet time with River before he, too, passes out...he asked to read several more books and watch a video about space ships.

We learn something new every day, but occasionally it's nice to have days like this when the process is totally impossible to ignore.

(Oh, and the picture is a lego model of a person riding a duck. Of course.)