With all the nice weather, we have been palling in the back yard more lately.  Claire has been into sports just a little bit lately, and we were practicing dribbling a basketball and hitting whiffle balls.

Molly got bored of this and went off to play with the pebbles and sand toys in the yard.  She ended up inventing a game which she dubbed “rock stand”.  In this game, you begin with a big crumbly rock (which I think was actually an old concrete ball).  You take another rock and whack the first rock into smaller pieces.  You then smash those little pieces into even smaller pieces and so on until there is only dust left.  There was a very important step in there that involved moving the small pieces between buckets using a certain shovel.

The game of rock stand is taken right from the pages of the Ramona Quimby books.  Ramona had a game called “brick factory” that involved smashing old bricks into smithereens.  She played brick factory with her friend Howie.  Molly basically is Ramona right now, although we don’t have a Howie.  Claire has stepped nicely into the role of Beezus, although Claire is generally even more patient and kind than Beezus, who was actually a pretty nice big sister too.