MONDAY’S GRANDCHILD

Judy and I look forward to Mondays ‘cause it’s the day we get to pick Lily up from her church’s “Wee Pre-School”! As excited as we are, she sometimes is less than enthusiastic, sometimes hanging her head with her lower lip sticking out, or, like yesterday, starts crying for her mother! This always makes the teacher a little apprehensive about turning her over to us. However, we have all the right credentials and we know her name…so we must be okay!

I’m always afraid to say, “Lily, tell the teacher who we are,” because you never know what she might say in the moment of missing her parents. Then what do you tell the police!

Anyway, about a block down the street, she stops crying, not a tear anywhere, and starts talking to us. Of course, this is after we’ve told her we are going somewhere to eat, going to the park, or going home to ride her bicycle.Bribery has been a tool of good parenting for ages, and it usually works!

This week we decided to eat out before going home, and pizza seemed to be the magic word in Lily’s mind this week. So, we stopped off at Brixx Pizza, home of “wood fired” pizzas!

The waitress gave Lily a lump of raw dough to play with, and some crayons. She pounded the dough, and we kept encouraging her to make a hand-print in the middle, but she decided it was much more fun to bite off little pieces and put them back on the plate. They usually take anything made by a child to the oven and bake it, but Lily wasn’t interested in playing their game.

Instead, she loved the “cave” under the table where she played with an imaginary bear! Luckily for us the place is new and the area under the table was carpeted and clean. She popped up every now and then to shout out “smile” to me holding the camera! It’s almost impossible to get a shot of wiggly 3-year-old!

Most shots are of the side or back of her head, with her still saying “smile”!

The pizzas were unique, but quite good, so we’ll probably go back at some point. The one shown is a “Bronx Bomber” with spicy Italian sausage, prosciutto, Gorgonzola cheese, tomato sauce and fresh oregano leaves. Judy had the Chicken Florentine with wood-roasted chicken, crumbled bacon, Roma tomatoes, fresh spinach, and feta and mozzarella cheeses. Lily’s was a cheese pizza that must have been good; because she wouldn’t even let me eat the end pieces she had leftover!

Back at home, she rode her bike, and busied herself plucking Holly Berries from the shrubs, and playing an imaginary fiddle made of a pine-cone and a stick she found.She had so much fun that we could not get her to take a nap. She lay on the bed and “rested” reading her books, saying her ABC's, and singing every song she knew.

Soon Corey arrived and she got up excited to see her dad and the prospects of seeing “her baby” (her little sister Kinsley) again!

Momma Judy and Papaw are left waiting for Monday to come around so they can play again too!