Epic

It’s hard living with a six year old sometimes. She needs care and feeding, and has an ill-developed sense of proportion.

Last night, we curled up together and I read her another chapter of Betsy-Tacy. It’s nice, this reading aloud that we’re doing these days. It used to be that I read her three books every night, chosen from her many picture books. In the past few months, though, we’ve settled into a pattern where I read her a chapter or two of a long format book that’s a little ahead of her ability to read herself, and she works through a pile of “just right” books before she falls asleep.

After we were done reading, she sat bolt upright in my bed and said "Mommy! I have a surprise for you!" She tossed aside one pillow, then the second, and then burst into hysterics when she pulled up the third pillow. You see, in a misguided attempt to, I don’t know, play princess and the pea?, she’d stuck a lump of kelly green Silly Putty under my pillow. Without its protective egg. Upon which we’d been reposing for a half hour.

Yes. A great sticky gob of Silly Putty was fused to both my pillow and the bottom sheet.

She sobbed and sobbed, in a gasping, wailing, over-the-top fit of remorse and regret. She knew she’d done wrong, both by my sheets that had to be changed, and by the ruined Silly Putty. Lord knows if the kelly green Silly Putty will ever come out of the sheets. As for the Silly Putty? "It was special to me" she said over and over, in between sobs.

I tell you, it was all I could do not to laugh.

All she really needed to do was say "I’m sorry Mommy, I shouldn’t have put Silly Putty under your pillow" – and she did, this morning – but that epic fit over something so ridiculous was pretty stunning.