I woke up to the sound of screams this morning for the first time in many months. I immediately knew my child was in pain. Curses. I groped around in the blurry room for my glasses and thought about how disappointed I was in myself for staying in bed past 7:15. Once I finally found my glasses on the ground wedged between my bed and the end table, I stumbled down the stairs and found Eliza kneeling on the ground grieving over some scotch tape that refused to adhere her construction paper to the basement door. Somewhere in my memory I had a partial recollection of her proudly displaying her marker illustration of a turtle with a human foot looming ominously above it and a crossed out circle drawn over the whole thing. It was a nice drawing. She had been doing art lessons with her dad this summer, and they had worked specifically on drawing turtles. Eliza had a special affinity for the smelly reptiles since we adopted our three swimming turtles several months before summer break. They now inhabited our basement, spending their days vainly and perpetually pumping their little legs in the shallow water against the glass trying to escape us, their gracious saviors and hosts.
I validated my child's frustration, demonstrated some tricky scotch tape skills for a crafty teaching moment, and secured the drawing to the basement door before cautioning my dear Eliza on her histrionics' possible side effect of misleading people into thinking someone was recently dismembered, hemorrhaging, and/or in need of life-saving rescue. She agreed that she had not cried that hard even when sustaining her current
bruise on her shin that shared a similar circumference to a 1/2 measuring cup, a battle wound from an unfortunate collision with a pool ladder.
Somewhere upstairs, I heard the faint sounds of my alarm going off. Time to start my day.
.JPG)
