Story-time, revisited

This morning we woke up to a dreary, rain-soaked, typical November-in-Washington kind of day. At first my attitude was positive...this is great! Zoey and I can stay in our jammies, bake some cranberry bread, curl up and watch Sesame Street together....

Clearly I wasn't pacing myself well enough. We accomplished all of the above by 9:45 a.m. At that point, the cloud-covered sun was up, my coffee-induced mania of planning activities was wearing off, and it was just shaping up to be a boring day.

What with money being a little tight lately, I really needed to come up with something fun and free to do with my daughter that involved getting out of the house. So, with some hesitation, I looked up the story-time hours at our local library.

I mention the hesitation only because Zoey and I have attempted story-time in the not-so-distant past and it was not pretty. As in, all the other young toddlers sat contentedly in their parent's laps listening to the stories as my child whipped wildly through the room yanking all books within her reach off the shelves. I literally broke a sweat chasing her around as other parents gave me sympathetic looks and obviously counted their blessings that their child was sitting still. I distinctly remember that one of these disastrous story-time events occurred when Zoey was 14 months old and IN A TOE-TO-THIGH LEG CAST. Still, she wreaked havoc in the library and not only were the parents sympathetic, they were also slightly horrified that a child in a cast could cause such destruction.

In fact, I'm pretty sure we haven't been back to story-time since then.

But then I spent a few minutes staring out the window, contemplating the rain. Then I spent a few more minutes observing Zoey hard at work at her latest project: removing any and all cushions from all the furniture at all times and randomly placing them in our small livingroom in such a way that is NOT conducive to walking a straight line without breaking one's ankle. The thought of being trapped inside with her all day as she....oh God...now she's trying to jump from the coffee table to the cushion-less couch...yes, we NEEDED to get out of the house.

So, at 10:45, I discovered story-time was conveniently schedule for 11:00. This meant a mad-dash through the house collecting coats, sippy cups, diaper bag...wrangling an angry child in to said coat as she fought desperately to return to her Cushion Project...dashing through the rain to the library...parking out in the back 40 and running through more rain as Zoey (who had since stopped crying) repeated over and over "yucky wain, yucky wain, yucky wain Mommy!". But we made it in one piece, and only 5 minutes late. Success.

Apparently many other moms in Vancouver had the same thought I did this morning, as the story-time circle was already quite full. I removed our wet coats and sat down in the back of the room and was pleasantly surprised to see that Zoey plunked herself down in my lap and began listening quietly to the story being read.

I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that THIS story-time lasted for an entire hour, not the half-hour I had anticipated. It turned out to be a great way to pass an hour...I'm chalking this one up to Zoey's recent exposure to preschool, considering that she was perfectly well-behaved throughout the whole hour. She danced with the scarves and the bells (although she refused to dance in the circle with the other kids, opting instead to stay right by my side and stomp on my hands by accident instead), she listened to the stories, and then we got to do arts and crafts! We colored a picture of a stove and glued orange tissue paper and pumpkin pie spice to little brown pie cut-outs, then glued the cut-outs to the stove. Zoey followed along with all the activities and LOVED it.

We slogged back out in the rain with two Mr. Rogers tapes (Zoey's latest love is the "choo-choo" on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood), a lovely pie-and-stove piece of artwork, and a great sense of relief that we were headed home for lunch and then....NAP TIME!