5:48 Early Thursday Evening (2 June 2011)

Kids. Wow.

Natalie dropped her little girl off at my place this morning so she could run a quick trip to the hospital with her poor jaundiced baby boy. I feel pretty useless around babies but feel like I can hold my own around a 2 year old for a few minutes anyway. haha. Was just happy there was something I could do to help honestly. Gotta say though, knowing that there's gonna be a small child in your house is a great motivation to tidy up all the clutter in my living room and bedroom. Kitchen, bathroom, and sewing room were already pretty tidy thankfully.

Keep in mind here that I haven't really done any true babysitting since I was 16. so. 7 ish years.

Some thoughts:

We had breakfast of fresh strawberries and yogurt. She was very agreeable, at least verbally, when I asked her if she wanted yogurt and strawberries...but then pretty much just picked out the strawberries. Makes me laugh! I also gave her a cup with a little bit of powerade in it that she didn't even touch, heh.

It's so funny to see what you think a toddler will be interested in compared to what they actually end up being interested in. For example, I dug up all these fun stuffed animals. She liked one, the dragon-snake thing I bought Caleb at Ikea several years ago, but she ended up wanting to play with the most random things. She jumped around on the DDR dance mat, climbed around the futon to look out the window (she reminds me of my cat...), tinkered around with my Swinub pokeball (impressively, she figured out how to work it faster than I did when I first got it). Caleb made some lovely purple play dough last night for her but we ended up not getting around to it. I will play with it instead.

My cat is either huge, or she is very small. He is thigh-high on her! She was a very nice-petter, which makes sense of course since she comes from a home of two kitties. He was a little scared when she was running around but when she walked up to him slowly he happily enjoyed being petted. He also wanted to eat her yogurt.

Anyway it was lovely to have her around, even just for half an hour. Hopefully the baby's bilirubin levels come down and his jaundice goes away, so Natalie can stop worrying about his health and they can travel to MT to be with their family in this difficult time.

In the meantime i have done nothing useful..just read books that I don't need to read and feel guilty about the papers I'm not reading and should be.