Skipping Town

We continued our Ocean City makeup weekend by taking a day trip today to Storm King Art Center, something I've been wanting to do for ages. It's about an hour and fifteen minutes away, an easy drive, and so worth it. We had a great time. Storm King is a sprawling sculpture park, 500 acres, with gigantic sculptures by Calder, Serra, Maya Lin, and many many more. It's a beautiful place, and walking through the enormous fields, with sculptures towering overhead, was stunning. We'd brought lunch and had a picnic under some trees. L&G had a lot of fun too, not least because I'd let them each bring a small purse with four ponies. The ponies came out to play whenever we stopped to take a break. A highlight for all of us was Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield. We climbed along and over and down the grassy waves, feeling much higher up than we actually were. We walked around for well over two hours and had just hopped on a tram to head toward the parking area when L...

Thursday, needing a good activity to kill some time before lunch, I decided the girls should finger-paint together. They’d done a tiny bit of fingerpainting once before and loved it, and this time I went all out—preparing a seat for Greta at the table, spreading out a huge sheet of paper, pouring paints into Tupperware lids. The girls loved it. Greta just liked grabbing handfuls of paint and squeezing the paint in her fingers. Lucia did some actual fingerpainting, but she, too, was more interested in getting as much paint on her hands as possible. It quickly became about as messy as I’d expected it to be, but then I realized I had no exit strategy—a paint-covered table, paint-covered chairs, paint-covered girls, their paint-covered clothes, and just me, trying to figure out how on earth to get us back to zero and get lunch made before, oh, six o’clock. I ended up wiping them down as best I could with a cloth and then taking them upstairs for a bath. There is still paint...

Today was a gloomy, rainy day, and Lucia and I spent a fun hour this afternoon painting for the first time. She loved it: dipping her brush in the paints, rinsing it in a cup of water, drawing on various sheets of construction paper. At one point, I went into the bathroom, and she followed me as she always does; but as soon as she entered the bathroom, she exclaimed, “I have painting to do!” and ran back to the living room. Andrew got home from work late, and Lucia and I were already in her nursery, reading stories. But I asked her if she wanted to show her paintings to Daddy, and she was just so excited—she ran at top speed into the living room, and I could hear her excitedly showing Andrew each of her masterpieces, jabbering incomprehensibly about using a paintbrush and rinsing it in water and putting paint on the paper. Pretty cute.