"Heavy-duty dumping!"

That is what Daisy was yelling when she played in the river in Healdsburg yesterday (picture below). She was fairly timid about the river, but did wade almost all the way out to the buoys with me (we were in a roped-in toddler section of the river). Other wilder kids were running around splashing violently and flinging mudballs, but Daisy only did a little splashing. She preferred to do her "swimming like a mermaid"--a game she invented in which she puts her hands down on the sand, or the floor of the tub, and floats her legs out in back of her. She had a bucket and a sand shovel, and when she sloshed the sand and water into the bucket and then dumped it periodically, she would shout, "Heavy duty dumping!"

I later found a reference to a "heavy duty dump truck" in one of her books, and it must have been where she got her inspiration. All the time now, she'll say something that mystifies me and I later find it in one of her books. For example, when she and Henry were chasing each other around the library last Thursday, she was shouting something over and over again that turned out to be "Splash, tumble, gush"--a phrase in one of her books that I had read to her maybe twice, and not particularly emphasized. It's very interesting to see, now, what sticks in her memory.