First Love

When we were up north a few weeks ago, the Canuck and I went out on the boat while Muffin stayed behind at Grandma’s house. When we returned and asked how things went, the Canuck’s aunt’s mom – Muffin’s honorary great-grandmother, really – told me they’d nearly blown their brains out with bubbles.

I know what she means.

B-U-B-B-L-E-S has become the first word I officially have to spell in Muffin’s presence to keep her from going bonkers. We keep the bubbles hidden in the bathroom, and limit their use to bath time and outside so we're not constantly dodging slippery patches on our hardwood floors. But if I so much as think about cracking open the bathroom door, Muffin makes a beeline for the medicine cabinets and starts frantically pointing upward. She moans for the bubbles with increasing volume, as if she’s been in the desert for days and is just spying water.

Bubble…BUBBLE…BUBBBBBBLE!!!

I even caught her curled up on the floor with her blankie, spooning the big jar of bubbles she’d somehow nicked from the bathroom counter.

You would think her obsession with bubbles means she loves to blow them, or at least watch them being blown. But she’s all about the dip. She could spend hours absorbed in the process of grabbing the wand, flipping it into position, lowering it into the jar and then pulling it out. Some of the time she holds it up for one of us to have at it, but usually she’s content to just repeat the dipping over and over. I am trying to teach her to blow some air into the wand herself, but so far my efforts have only resulted in her ingesting a copious amount of bubble solution. Yucky, I tell her, but she just smiles and keeps on dipping.