Soap opera here we coooooome! (Volume on low even though the headphones should make it not a problem.) Evelyn feels slightly like she's being a bad foster carer, but Annie is fine and probably doesn't even like Evelyn always hovering. 

At 1:00 pm she emerges and they can have cold tuna salad, if Annie's appetite is back. 

Yup, Annie is ready to eat a little pile of tuna salad.

And once they've eaten, Evelyn will clear her throat and bring up that she really thinks Annie ought to do one (1) activity this afternoon that isn't reading.

"Reading is lovely and I'm glad you like it so much - it's like pulling teeth, getting some kids to read anything! - but I also think it's important for children to do things with their hands and things with their bodies. Cooking is a good activity and we did that already, but - how would you feel about trying some crafts? Modeling clay, if you like, or I can show you all the craft supplies I have and you can tell me which ones you think you could do given your visual impairment?" 

"I could do some modeling clay, okay."

Then after lunch Evelyn will dig out the big plastic storage box of Fimo modeling clay blocks in different colors. She can help keep track of the colors for Annie, though conveniently most of them are still wrapped in their original labeled packaging. 

"I'm going to make something for Miss Enderbridge, I think," she says cheerfully. "Maybe a nice little figurine of a girl on a bench with some books. ...That might be ambitious, but we'll see." 

"Does she have a place to display things like that?" Annie asks, taking some labeled blue and some labeled purple and starting to roll them out flat.

"She has some knickknacks in the kitchen. I suppose you wouldn't have been able to see it. There were some cross-stitched samplers on the walls and some ceramic figurines on the windowsill by the sink. And I know when she was still teaching, she used to have the art that the schoolchildren did on her fridge all the time, but I think she packed it away rather than let it get all faded or dirty." 

Evelyn rolls out some green and uses the palette knife to cut the edges into a square, and gets out one of the other modeling-clay tools, which has a bent end with tines like a fork for making patterns. "- There are tools for imprinting things on the modeling clay," she adds. "The one I'm using makes a pattern like grass, so I'm going to use that before I make the bench to sit on the base." 

"Are any of them sharp?" Annie asks, hovering her hand over them.

"Not sharp-sharp. Some are pointy like forks are pointy, you wouldn't want to run around with them and trip, but they're not sharp enough to cut you if you're just touching them." Evelyn gets out some brown - not the labeled brown, the ball from last time a foster child combined five different colors thoroughly enough that she couldn't re-separate them - and starts rolling out tubes for bench legs. "There are some stencil shapes and some tools with wooden handles like paintbrushes that have different tips. I think most of them should still have labels on the handle but some are worn off, so you can ask me if you need to." 

"I can feel them, I just wanted to make sure I wouldn't cut myself." She picks them up and examines them and chooses one suitable for smoothing out rough surfaces.

Evelyn rolls out and cuts out a brown rectangle and uses the edge of the palette knife to score lines in it to represent wooden slats. Of course, it ends up squashy at the corners when she tries to attach the legs, but that's okay. 

She watches Annie curiously, but doesn't ask what she's making. Annie can tell her if she wants. 

Annie is very carefully slicing up her purple and her blue into stripes and turning them into a coil pot sort of shape. She's very patient with it and fusses over little unevennesses a lot.

Unusual for a three-year-old, but it fits with Annie's personality. Evelyn won't offer to help unless Annie seems frustrated with it (for one thing, Evelyn is less patient than that). She carefully picks out out a lump of white and smaller lumps of pink and yellow, to mix together for a peach-tone for her "little girl". 

"I think I'll try to make a school uniform sort of outfit," she says, mostly to make conversation. "There's a tool that makes tiny little button-shaped indents, so I can give her a school vest with buttons down the front. Most of the schools here don't have uniforms but I think the private school where Miss Enderbridge used to teach would have." 

"Did the uniforms have vests?"

"I don't know for sure if they did! It might not be the exact same uniform. There was a Catholic school in my neighborhood when I was little and they wore black skirts and white blouses with long sleeves and dark blue vests with buttons, so that's what I'm going to try to do. ...With 'try' being the operative word here. My fingers are so big and pudgy compared to yours and I think I might not be as patient." 

"If I'm going to make something at all I'd like it to be a nice thing."

Nod. "I'm sure it's going to be lovely." Having made a nice peach-toned blob and rolled two tubes for legs, Evelyn starts flattening out some black modeling clay for a skirt. 

Annie laboriously crafts a blurry-striped pot suitable for putting on a windowsill full of flowers, with drainage holes, little feet, and a matching drip tray, and then starts supplementing it with delicate little filigree.

Annie is GREAT and Evelyn is so fond of her.

She gets out the checkerbox-pattern tool and carefully patterns the skirt-rectangle before wrapping it around the legs and attaching both to a navy-blue torso chunk, which can acquire button-indentations and little white-sleeve arms tipped with peach blobs for hands and a peach blob for a head. She tries to make black-on-white eyeballs and put them into holes she makes for eye sockets, but they come out way too large for the head in question and looking kind of bulgy and horrifying. Oh well. She goes with indenting the mouth rather than trying to stick red lips on and ending up with something horrifyingly clowny, and then adds a brown cap of carefully-textured "hair" with "braids" hanging from each side, and seats the figure on the bench, squashing the skirt a bit in the process of trying to make sure it's stuck on solidly enough to stay. She cuts out differently-colored tiny rectangles to make a stack of books on the bench beside the girl, and rolls a thin white sheet on top of a thin black sheet to make an open book in her lap with a 'cover', scoring and bending it in the middle. The end result is...definitely not artist-quality, but at least Annie can't see the goggle-eyes. 

Even with all the detail work, she's finished before Annie has all of her filagree arranged to her satisfaction. "That is lovely!" she says as she watches Annie put on the finishing touches. "Did you want to put a little flower in it, once it's baked?" 

"Or herbs or something, since I won't be able to see flowers. It did turn out all right? I was trying pretty hard to keep the purple and blue straight but had to do it by memory."

"It's perfect! You must have a very good memory. I love the little extra decorations, too. And the feet!" 

Evelyn will go preheat the oven to bake their modeling-clay creations. Annie has completed her mandatory Non Reading Activity of the day and can go back to reading now. 

Oh good.

Evelyn makes a hearty chickpea salad in advance of dinnertime, and emails the social worker to confirm that Annie had a delightful time meeting a fellow passionate book-lover (sheeeee does not mention the Kafka, in case Anthony considers it age-inappropriate) and that Miss Enderbridge has a current police check, do they need an actual copy of it from her or can they just check with the school. She tries the pottery studio again, and is told to call back in two days. She rejoins Annie and starts a new Agatha Christie (she does have quite a lot of them in her personal library.) 

At dinnertime they can have salad. Evelyn feels like she wants to ask Annie...something...but she isn't sure what, so she just makes conversation about how she had forgotten how much she liked Agatha Christie's mysteries, and asks Annie how she's enjoying her own book picks. 

"The Trial ends very abruptly! I skipped the pages Miss Enderbridge told me to but it did make the book make somewhat less sense. I think probably it would be all right for my well being to read about people being seduced and flogged but I have no way to convince you of this."

Oh dear did Annie overhear that. "Maybe," Evelyn allows noncommittally. "I know grownups have a lot of opinions about what is or isn't good for children your age and it's probably annoying sometimes. ...You could write a little book report about it, I bet it would make Miss Enderbridge's day and get you ahead on, er, book bribes." Evelyn is sliiiiightly uncomfortable about the concept of bribes being introduced to a child Annie's age but it's sort of too late to complain.