Child’s Play

We were house-bound a good bit of the time in Dakota, but even so, we were able to do some “fun” things with Abby.

She’d never had much chance to jump rope, but her dad had a professional-quality rope (leather?) that was of course, too long for Abby, but worked very well with two people operating the controls (Granny Anny and the Dumpster).

With considerable practice, Abby learned to run in while the rope was high, and even jump and turn ’round a couple of times. She was quite proud, and so were we. And it burned off a little of that surplus of energy that six-year-olds need to vent (but ~60 year olds, not so much.) Here you can see she has pretty good hang-time–some good springs in those young legs!

We also worked a little on using the bow-and-arrow that had arrived earlier in the week from Goose Creek by mail. There’s more coordination to such a simple thing than you’d think, until you break down all the steps that have to be learned in sequence to make it work.

She finally got to where she could get one of the suction-cup-tipped arrows pretty much across the downstairs room–another new skill under her belt.

However, those feathers (that were simply for looks, glued to one side of the shaft) were too much temptation for Maggie the cat, who promptly picked up an arrow in her mouth and ran off with it and ate the “bird” part of the arrow. Bad cat!