A Riff

I want to be five again. My daughter heals so fast that it makes me feel my advancing years and slow motion cellular response to injury. Her head bump was much better the next day. I checked on her all through the night and she woke up in full hyperactive puppy mode....running through the house and cutting paper like mad with the result that my house now looks like we hold regular ticker-tape parades.

Thank goodness.

The relief was immense.

We are almost ready for Christmas. I think I'm done shopping for my chickadee. There's some pressure as we're trying to avoid a repeat of last year where the educational presents were legion and she had no idea what anything was.

I will never forget how polite she was about it, opening each gift and staring it as she tried to puzzle out wtf it was. She said thank you very sweetly before chucking it over her shoulder and moving on to the next, her body language tight with hope that the next gift would make sense.

I felt so bad last year. Yes, she had gifts, lots of gifts, but they didn't impart joy or delight, just confusion.

This year, I've tried to remember she is all about the girl bling. The name of the game is balancing our need to shower her with microscopes and books with her raison d'etre, which appears to be pink glitter.

This may possibly involve my husband in the garage on Christmas Eve trying to glam up a microscope.

Okay, we probably won't do that, but let the record show we are fully capable of doing so. We have glitter and paint guns and an assortment of specialty paints. It wouldn't exactly be outside the realm of our weirdness.

So anyway, head injury crisis averted. I have no idea how my parent is doing, but assume we would've heard by now if the dogs had killed them off.