Firsts

It's a brisk 101 degrees in Phoenix tonight. Olivia is busily divesting shelf after shelf of their books in our library. Pretty soon she'll start in on the closet. It didn't take her long to figure out how to slide the doors open. (Anybody have any great ideas on how to lock them or otherwise toddler-proof them?)

While Olivia is doing more than enough to educate herself, we still feel obligated to provide certain life experiences for her. Today she went to the DMV (or MVD as they are calling themselves these days) with me. We spent about an hour there, where she learned how to listen for specific letter and number combinations to know when it was our turn. Even though she was sleepy, she was very attentive and threw her lamb on the floor only six times. She watched as Mommy filled out paper work, got a new license plate, registration, and driver's license and hand over enough money to buy a hundred gallons of whole milk. She also saw an Elvis-impersonator-wannabe and a girl wearing a skirt so short it disappeared when she sat down. So, her first trip to the DMV was also her first variety show.

Daddy's contribution to Olivia's education was taking us to a Soul Food restaurant tonight. (It's in the fine print of Brigham's job description to find Soul Food, Pho, and a great Thai place everywhere we live.) Olivia enjoyed the fried chicken, cornbread, fries, some of Daddy's sweet potato fries, and her first teeny, tiny taste of beer (root beer, that is). She was especially entertained by sitting in a booster seat for the first time. (What kind of restaurant doesn't have high chairs?) It would have been a more successful venture (from my perspective) if she had been pinned in on either side. As it was, I was hard pressed to keep her in her seat. She took a particularly graceful dive out of it that certainly wouldn't have ended very gracefully if I hadn't caught her by the back of her pants just before she would have hit the floor. Near the end of our delicious, but not-so-carefully choreographed, meal I discovered pieces of Olivia's mostly masticated french fries down my shirt. Don't ask me how it got there--I don't know--but it took some careful choreography to extract the cold, mushy potato fragments from my bra without anyone else noticing what I was doing.