House guests

This weekend, we are hosting two stuffed animals, two picture books, and a journal, courtesy of Dutch's daycare. Every weekend, one kid gets to take home this package, and we're supposed to record in the journal the critters' adventures with our family. The animals are a hippo and a tortoise, and they go with these books. The books tell the true story of an interesting animal behavior oddity, but the books themselves are painfully poorly written and incredibly tedious. Especially on the 45th reading. Cook has been dragooned into playing "Haller Park" (the name of the wildlife park where the real animals live), which entails repeatedly re-enacting the whole story ("Now let's rescue Owen from the ocean!"). We are grateful that the whole package goes back to daycare tomorrow. Now, however, we're under pressure to generate an interesting contribution to the journal. The first kid who took them home (we're only the second family to host) took them to ballet class AND gymnastics class. We've just been feeding them lots of plastic tea.