Rilla-My-Rilla

August 27, 2009 @ 7:04 pm | Filed under: Rilla,These People Crack Me Up

All my best Rilla material—the stories and quotes I want to save forever—winds up on Twitter and Facebook these days. (That’s the fastest way to jot something down.) But just in case Twitter goes kaboom someday, I think I’ll start a Rilla-page here for easy future memory-laning. Like most three-year-olds, she is one funny little monkey.

***

Rilla, drinking water from a mug, asks if we can pretend it’s coffee.

Me: “Sure! How is your coffee, ma’am?”

Rilla: “I don’t like coffee.”

***

Rilla: “Mommy, can we have a babysitter named Daphne?”

***

Rilla chirps, bouncing: “Mommy! I’m going to free mini-Hawk Girl from the dungeon!”

Rose explains: “She means buy it on Amazon.”

***

Rilla deposits terrifyingly lifelike snake on my feet, announces: “It won’t eat me. ” Pries open rubber jaws, peers inside. “See? It won’t.”

(She sounds disappointed.)

***

Rilla names letters on cereal box: “L-I-F-E.”

Scott: “What’s that spell?”

Rilla: “Butterfly!”

***

Rilla’s question of the day: “Which people bounce?”
***

July 22nd. She just came in carrying a small wicker picnic basket. Knelt, opened basket, carefully spread napkin on floor, took out A BOWL OF CEREAL.

***

July 17th. “Mom, what’s your favorite color? Choose red.”

***

July 13th. Rilla has spent the past 20 sitting in an armchair licking a little piece of Japanese candy with all the intensity her 3yo self can muster.

***

Spent the last two hours wearing a necklace on my head as crown because I am (so Rilla declares) Mommy Princess. Forgot about it until I leaned over the dishwasher and it fell in.

***

July 9th. Rilla found reading big fat YA novel. “This is my faborite book.” 3 minutes later, book is cast aside in disgust. “I don’t like it. It has WORDS.”

***

July 8th. Overheard—

14yo: “Do you need help pouring the milk?”

3yo: “Nope.”

14yo: “Are you sure?”

3yo: “I don’t want to be sure.”

***

(a work in progress)

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And yet—and yet—I think we are at once ‘carried away’ and made more fully present in the now, more rooted, by these relationships between ideas about things past and future. The joy of connection makes me want to celebrate this moment, this brief encounter with wild-haired child and broad-trunked tree, bus going by, sign on church wall, Scottish warlord creeping over the tower wall and startling the English soldier’s wife who has just put her babe in arms to sleep by crooning that the Black Douglas won’t get him. Child, laughing, shouting “Dinna ye be sae sure aboot that!” across the courtyard outside the library. How can I not celebrate this freedom?

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