Well, not a story, really, just a funny moment. She misheard me about the title of Katy No-Pocket: “Kangaroo Market? That sounds like a good story.”
It does, rather! Hmm…
Today Rilla asked me to “draw something for her to copy.” I wasn’t clear what this meant, at first. She explained that she likes to find drawings by her big sisters and copy them herself. Now she wanted to copy one of mine. “A ballerina, please.”
I began to sketch a head, trying to keep it simple. But I’d barely reached the shoulders when Rilla shook her head, distressed. “Um, not that kind, Mommy. Not the kind that looks like a real person.” (Worth noting: there was no danger of my lopsided ballerina looking real. Or even human, really. There’s a reason I’m a word person, not a picture one.)
But it was clear she had something specific in mind, so I pressed for enlightenment. “What kind did you want?”
“I’ll show you. Like the one in this picture.”
She scurried off and came back with a lovely crayon rendering of a pink ballerina. That she had drawn herself.
“Draw it just like this, Mommy. So I can copy it.”
Last night Rilla fell asleep reading herself (out loud) a Little Bear book. She was snuggled in beside me as I worked: this is a pattern we’ve fallen into lately, a good one. I work in the evenings. Scott handles dinner and the bedtime hubbub. Wonderboy conks out around eight, and then Scott and the older girls will often watch a little TV—an episode of M.A.S.H., most likely, or maybe a Mythbusters. Sometimes Rilla has crashed by this point, but if she’s still awake she gets to come into our room—I work on our bed—and look at books.
Some nights I’m ready to quit writing, and I’ll read a story to her. Other nights, I need to keep plugging away, but she likes that too: I think she feels like she’s getting away with something special, hanging out with Mommy during Work Time.
We realized that on these nights, we need to make sure she is stocked with beginning readers. Picture books have too sophisticated a vocabulary for her to read by herself, right now. Little Bear, Elephant and Piggie, Frog and Toad: these are just right.
At her age, “reading to yourself” means “reading out loud.” Silent reading is perhaps a year away. I get caught up in listening. Can’t help it! Such a delight, those confident trotting sentences and then the stumble, the try and re-try and a tap on my arm, “Mommy, what’s this word?”
My book will get written. This Rilla-story unfolds only once. I’m on the edge of my seat.
We’re in the backyard cleaning up the patio flowerbed. This has inspired a game of Pixie Hollow fairies, and I’m informed that I am Rosy, a “garden talent” fairy, and Rilla is my helper, Posy. (She has a deceptively cherubic baby-brother fairy named Cozy, who seems to have a rock-throwing talent.)
Talent notwithstanding, before any gardening can be done it is imperative (so I’m told) that I assume the correct accent for Rosy. “Sort of like Paula Deen,” Rose (not Rosy) coaches me. “Say darlin‘ a lot.”
All right, I can do that. Rose runs off to suck lemons with Beanie and Wonderboy on the sunny side-yard wall, leaving “Posy” and me to cut back the parsley and uproot tiny shoots of clover from the flowerbed. Posy is very nearly as sparkly as a real fairy, so delighted is she to have me all to herself, in the sun, with flowers, for a little while—young master Cozy having been hauled away for a nap by his father, whose talent is toddler-wrangling.
It was every bit as delightful as it sounds—despite the itchysneezy misery I’m grappling with this allergy season (I know, it sounds crazy to call February allergy season, but southern California is a crazy, crazy place). For some inexplicable reason, Claritin (and Zyrtec and Sudafed and everything else I’ve tried) make me unbearably drowsy. This is a new thing, just this year. The whole point of Claritin is it’s supposed to NOT make you drowsy, but it totally knocks me out. I mean, it might as well be Benadryl. So anyway, I’m muddling through without allergy meds and it’s made yard work a bit of a challenge this year. But, you know, burning eyes are a small price to pay for sunshine and flowers in the dead of winter. I only mention it because of the sneezing. Tending the posies with Posy, I got very sneezy and asked her to run into the house for a tissue for me.
While she was gone I sneezed four more times in rapid succession. Things were getting a little desperate when, thank goodness, Posy reappeared.
And handed me a single square of toilet paper.
“That’s a fairy tissue,” she said.
Rose is showing me a series of pictures she has colored in a Dover book of dragons. She flips to one particularly fearsome-looking creature with deadly claws and an evil glare.
“This one is Rilla’s,” she tells me.
“Hi, Sugar,” says Rilla, leaning close to kiss the beast tenderly upon its snarling, dagger-toothed snout. “My little sweetie.”
Me (singing): What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and uh-understaaaanding…
Rilla: Mommy, that’s not how the Fresh Beat Band sounds.
Rilla: Mommy, I changed my mind. I’m not going to be a princess OR a necklace maker.
Me: Oh? What are you going to be?
Rilla: Your child!
(To the tune, of course, of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.”)
All I want is a cinnamon bear
From that package right over there
With mommy for a chair
Oh isn’t it just loverly
All the red bears that I can eat
A little bit spicy, a little bit sweet
I like to start with the feet
Oh isn’t it just loverly
Oh so loverly eatin’ absobloominlutely all
I have a giant appetite, even though I am very small
Cinnamon bears clutched in both my fists
Cinnamon mouth with a cinnamon kiss
And mommy’s singing about this!
Oh isn’t
This
Just loverly.
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)