Little Miss Excitable

My parents came home from Hawaii on Saturday and lost no time in coming to see the kids on Sunday afternoon. The closest they have come to seeing them over the past three months is via our biweekly Skype visits, during which Liam often could not be coerced into saying so much as hello, but in which Mallory was constantly parading a stream of dolls and story books past the computer screen to capture her grandparents' attention. I think everyone thinks I exaggerate when I say that Mallory is a bundle of energy, that she is always running when she should be walking and talking when she should be quiet. She is on the move and yammering from the moment she wakes up until we put her to bed, and then she jumps out of bed and lies down on the floor and plays with her dolls in the dark and hollers at us through the crack under the door for another half hour or so most nights until she finally falls asleep.

My parents have not seen Mallory in person in three months, and I think the reunion drove home the point about how much her attention hog and chatterbox tendencies have intensified during that time. She spent all of two minutes making strange with them and then she subjected them to a three-hour barrage of doing puzzles and dressing up in her princess costume and baking pretend cookies for them and reading our new crop of library books and otherwise making sure that they did not get a moment's rest the entire time they were over. We ate dinner in the kitchen, with my parents taking Chad's and my regular spots at the table and us eating on the stools, and Mallory ran her mouth during the entire meal, telling them repeatedly that it was OK for them to sit in her mom and dad's chairs.

When she finally finished eating, it was time for several rounds of hide and seek before more books and one final puzzle. She spent the last fifteen or twenty minutes of their visit running in circles and twirling on the living room rug with them as her audience. You tell her not to do something because she is going to make herself sick, and of course it becomes a game to her to do it over and over again. We finally gave granmma and grampa a kiss and a hug and let them escape. If the jet lag had not gotten to them yet then I am pretty sure that Mallory tired them out plenty during that three-hour visit.

And I'm sure it won't come as any surprise to gramma and grandma that after they left, Mallory collapsed in a heap in a bean bag chair to watch a movie, and threw up. Keeping up a lifestyle like hers can take its toll.