Monday afternoon was almost as foggy outside in downtown San Francisco as it was in Golden Gate Park on Saturday. Mabel Watson Payne woke up slowly and reluctantly from her nap. We let the afternoon proceed at her pace and stayed indoors for a change, playing with a couple of the birthday toys, making big ambitious pictures full of non-human life-forms, and reading a big stack of books about her new favorite literary character, Max (the toddler-sized rabbit who makes one big mess after another in spite of his older bossy rabbit sister Ruby). After each Max book, Mabel would look around her own living room at the scattered toys and art supplies and ask (with satisfaction),
"Who made this big mess?"
In the sequence below she is telling a story in baby-language that I could not actually translate well enough to comprehend. In this case, though, I faked it successfully and avoided the loud and frustrated repetitions of Mabel's words that issue forth if she notices she is not being understood.
