Buddy

The kids like to tell us about their day at the dinner table. It's awesome. Jake and I are talking about the district budget cuts and in the middle of that Nora pipes up "Did you play basketball with Buddy?" (That's her way of saying, "ask me if I played basketball with Buddy.") Oh, did you? "Yeah!" she chirps. Milo pipes in "I did slam dunks!"

The kids have a friend down the street named Millie. Buddy is good friends with Millie's nanny, so they get together and do things as a group of 5 all the time. Tomorrow Millie turns 2 so today Nora and Milo went over to Millie's house to bake birthday cookies. Actually first Buddy took them to the store to get some supplies. Buddy writes notes about the day and in her notes, she remarked "Milo wants a ball and a bat, and another ball, and another ball." Then they went to Millie's and baked cookies in the shape of "M" and "2". They also ate birthday cupcakes, and Buddy took some great pictures of the kids with cupcake mouths. (This was a rare treat, but it was, after all, Millie's birthday). Also, Buddy enacted a miracle with Nora and got her to eat (drumroll) mac 'n cheese! This is the first time in her entire life that Nora has actually eaten some pasta. I think eating lunch at Millie's is good for her because of the peer pressure. She sees Milo and Millie eating people food, so maybe she realizes it is a good idea.

Later they came back and played basketball and then read library books. Each week Buddy takes the kids to the library and together they pick out 10 or 20 books. Buddy keeps them at our house in a giant blue bag and we read through them. This is great for me and Jake because it is fun to read different books rather than the same ones over and over again. (We do plenty of that too). The kids also read a book that belongs to Buddy about helicopters. She brought it over because Milo has been talking about helicopters a lot lately.

Our house is also filled with CDs of children's music that Buddy owns. She has a lot of kid stuff up her sleeve. "I have things stashed everywhere throughout your house!" she told me cheerfully. It's true. She has some puppets here, as well as her CDs and books and who knows what else. She's always bringing over little things for the kids. Stickers, or crayons, or chalk.

Every day Buddy takes the kids on a different outing, unless they're sick. They go to the toddler gym, to story time, to the library, or the other library, or to Trader Joe's, or the city gardens, or the children's cafe. This morning, I meant to ask Buddy to give the kids a bath because I hadn't gotten around to it on Thursday like I'd intended to. But I completely forgot to ask her. Tonight when I came home, she mentioned that she had given them a bath because she had observed their towels still hanging in the same spot, so she knew they hadn't had one.

At this point I feel really lucky that we have Buddy. The Twin Whisperer still visits the kids on a weekly basis and often takes them on outings. She doesn't want to be paid for this, she just does it because she misses the kids and likes to see them. The kids still love that and talk about the Twin Whisperer. But now they're talking about Buddy too, and this morning when Buddy came, instead of crying, Nora said "Good morning! How are you?"

When Jake starts his job this summer and we finally have two incomes, we're totally giving Buddy a raise. She's worth every penny and more.