I am... not a ballerina!

Bekka was anxious to get out of the house and DO something today, so we took the camera and walked downtown. This picture was taken at Central Park.

I had slept in really late this morning - we've been staying up really late (or should I say early, since we haven't been going to bed until well after midnight) and I just couldn't make it out of bed at my normal 9am this morning. (If you don't know, I'm a night owl, and we are radical unschoolers, so we don't have to get up early - well, we really don't HAVE TO do ANYTHING!!) So, anyway, I hadn't realized that Bekka didn't really eat lunch before our outing and she ended up getting really hungry (and as an extension of that, really grumpy). When she gets like that, she can't figure out what to eat - nothing sounds good and she just gets more and more frustrated.

My old, traditional parenting self would have gotten a bit frustrated too, but today I just stayed calm and started taking pictures of the interesting stuff around us while she took the time she needed to work through being frustrated. We stood on the street corner downtown for what felt like half an hour (but I'm sure wasn't), then sat at a local restaurant, then walked over to the bookstore, and THEN she decided that I needed to tell her what to eat! So I took her to Zia, which is a New Mexican place that just opened up. She became much happier, and decided to stay downtown while I walked home to get the car to pick her up.

She's still in a bit of a funk, and I'm still happy! Life as a peaceful parent is, well, peaceful!