The art museum was having a pirate-themed family fun night on Friday evening, but when I told Alice about it the night before, she almost started crying because she was so scared of pirates (despite ample pirate books that are not the least bit scary.) She eventually calmed down after many assurances that only friendly pirates would be at the art museum. I like this mixture of fantasy and logic. I remember this technique working long ago with her beanstalk nightmare, where instead of saying it wasn't real (because that wouldn't make sense to her) I assured her that there were no bean seeds in her room, no crack in the floor, no moon. Here too, explaining that the pirates weren't real wouldn't make sense, because she would indeed see real people dressed like pirates. But friendly pirates, that she could understand.
So I picked up Alice from school and took her to a restaurant for supper before going to the museum. She's a disaster in restaurants because she is too distracted to eat, and the food doesn't appeal to her enough. But Guasaca has amazing Venezuelan food, it was fast and cheap, and it was early enough that the restaurant shouldn't be too crowded. All of my calculations were correct. Alice ate the rice and chicken and cheese (she didn't like the plantains though). I put her on the side with the booth so she wouldn't be in danger of escaping or knocking over her chair. It wasn't pretty, but we survived, and the restaurant was nearly empty so we weren't disturbing anyone.
Then it was off to the museum, where we met up with Izzy and Grayson. Izzy is very physical, like Alice, but she is not the least bit shy. It was really neat to see how Alice, who would never dance in front of an audience on her own, was effectively drug out on to the dance floor by Izzy, where they wildly careened around, but managed not to damage anything or anyone.
The other super fun thing was Alice and Grayson getting spun in a chair by Grayson's dad. Never mind that we're at the art museum--to these kids every place is a playground.
Finally, Alice and Grayson went into the craft area and made these weird necklace things. While crafting, I told Grayson's mom that this was like Christmas eve for us, because Santa was coming to our house tomorrow. She looked at me like I was crazy. Even when I explained the whole Ohio thing, and what I think is a very logical solution, she still said, "Wow, that's early." I confess I do have some doubts about our plan sometimes, about being so out of sync with the rest of the world. In my mind, tonight was a very special night, but to everybody else, it was just a Friday night about a week before Christmas.
