I was sick with the flu for a week. Just about when I was getting better, my niece Moon wound up with the same flu. I know that my mom has been trying to work at their soon-to-be new house every weekend, so I volunteered to spend the day with Moon yesterday so that they could still get work done, but she could just take it easy.
She came by around 11:30 and we had a breakfast of apple pancakes, then watched cartoons. She doesn’t get to watch much tv at home, and she loves that I have cable. I wanted to take her apple picking, but I know that I wasn’t all that energetic by the time I hit the point she was at and, since the sky was threatening rain, we decided not to do that. Instead, we did a quick grocery shopping and haunted a couple of dollar stores.
She’s so much fun to go shopping with, even if it’s just at a dollar store. We found a box of personalized pens. Very cool pens, actually, that just happened to be personalized. She started going through the box, asking, "What does this say? What about this one? What does this say?" She’s starting to learn to read, and tried to guess that since one pen said "Lydia", all the "L" pens said Lydia, but it was the Kristen pen that most cracked me up.
"Auntie Fyre, what does this one say?"
"Kristen."
"HA! That’s a silly name for a pen."
We tried on all the halloween stuff and talked about what was cool and what was silly. We put a quarter in the gumball machine to watch the bells, whistles and converyer belts. We bought silly, little dollar store things after an hour of just looking at what was available. It was a blast. She even ran into an old classmate of hers from dance class.
Often when Moon and I spend too much time together, we make each other a little crazy. She likes to push my buttons over and over again, but yesterday was not like that at all. She helped me cook, told me *exactly* what she wanted for dinner. She was pleasant conversation and a lot of fun to be around. She stayed until 8pm, which was completely fine with me.
When she left, she was as polite as can be. "Thank you for having me over, Auntie Fyre. I had a really good time." Well I had a really good time, too. And I had a day of not dwelling on all the crap that seems to surround me pretty often. It was a really wonderful day.