Catching up

We've had a crazy week. The big rain storm caused a culvert to collapse near our town's water wells so they had to shut them down to prevent contamination from the flood. So the town has only one working well and everybody has to conserve water to keep it flowing. My neighbors are doing things like putting a bucket in the shower to collect water to flush the toilet and shoveling water out of the back yard for flushing. We've been conserving too, but unfortunately Molly has made it incredibly difficult. She has thrown up every day this week -- a couple times from gagging on water, once all over Jim's truck from car sickness, three times yesterday for no reason we can understand. She doesn't seem sick. Anyway, I've been doing a lot of laundry and giving lots of baths, using more water than usual instead of less. Oh, well. The best was when she threw up just as we were lying down to fall asleep for nap. I had to strip the bed down, do a load of laundry and put Molly in the tub. Then I put baking soda on the mattress for the stink and when I was vacuuming it up, Molly's pants got stuck under the vacuum and I didn't realize it until the belt had melted and the entire room stank of burnt rubber. So I opened the windows in the blowing rain, trying to air it out quickly, made the bed and somehow pretended to be calm to get a 2-year-old relaxed enough to sleep.

Anyway, here's what I would have posted about a few days ago if I wasn't so busy cleaning up messes.

On Saturday we went to Vermont to celebrate Eve's third birthday. Molly was Eve's shadow most of the time, especially when she was opening presents.

Birthday cupcakes!
Playing around before the party.
Then on Sunday we went to Cambridge with Jeff to see Japanese Taiko drumming and dancing at MIT. It was Molly's first experience in a theater and it went about as well as we expected -- that is to say, she liked wandering around the theater with Daddy before the show started, got nervous as soon as the lights went down and after the second piece was crying so I took her out. Not bad. So while the guys watched the show we wandered around campus and down to the Charles River to look at sailboats.
Here's Molly at the river.
And goofing around at MIT (she's making a "bridge" with her legs, like I do when she's riding her little plastic bike thing down the sidewalk and I want to direct her back toward the garage by having her ride through my legs)
Happy to be walking back to the car.

And this is what we did yesterday. Easter eggs!!! We made most of the dyes out of food coloring but I did two colors from recipes in Joy of Cooking -- pink dye from beets and yellow from turmeric. They came out OK but not as intense as the food coloring. Probably not worth the effort.

Meanwhile, Molly's Easter basket grass is growing like crazy.

So we were able to use it as an Easter basket, at least for a few minutes until I felt bad about crushing the grass so we put the eggs in the fridge.