I said “Stand still so Mommy can take a pretty picture of you at the lake!” and this is what I got.
I stood up after taking her pictures and she said “Mommy, you are tall!” Then she thought about that for a minute and said “I not tall. I just very…down.”
Last week my step-grandfather passed away and so we made the eight hour drive to my grandmother’s house, which is in a very rural area of Tennessee. That is code for “I could not get wi-fi anywhere. And also is there is no Starbucks.”
With all of the family in town, we stayed in a tiny little cabin on the lake. And do you even know what happened at eleven o’clock on Thursday night? There was a tornado warning, that’s what. My phone alarmed and started saying we were in “imminent danger” and stuff was flying off trees and then the weather guy on the television was all “GET IN YOUR SAFE PLACE RAT NAO!” Only I was like “I don’t have a safe place! I am in a tiny little cabin on a lake!”
Here is what I did about that:
I am a little bit afraid of tornadoes, basically.
On the plus side, I now know that I can squeeze an entire mattress into a tiny shower stall in under a minute. I know, I should totally put that bit on my resume. I’ve got skills, they’re multiplying.
Scarlette slept right through the whole thing. She literally slept through a tornado. I like to call this phenomenon a “NICU perk.”
I had told Scarlette that we were going to Tennessee and she said “Oh yay, we goin to Auntie J’s house! She live in Tennessee!” Which is true, Jeanette does live in Tennessee. We visited her in July and I was surprised that Scarlette remembered her geography so well. Then I explained to her that we were going to a different part of Tennessee and for the entire rest of the trip she kept looking out of the window shouting “DIS IS NOT TENNESSEE! DIS NOT WHAT TENNESSEE IS!”
At some point Scarlette was acting up and I said “Well, we are going to try again.” And then Scarlette said “NO, we NOT going to Twy Again. We goin to Tennessee!” So I told her that actually we were already in Tennessee and she said “NO! DIS NOT WHAT TENNESSEE LOOK LIKE!”
I have no idea what it is that she thinks Tennessee looks like.
On the way there I was contemplating how to talk to Scarlette about funerals. Given that we could not travel for the first couple of years after Scarlette’s birth and that my step-grandfather was too ill to travel as well, she did not really know him. I did not think she would fully grasp the concept of death yet and so I decided to just explain to her that our friends might be feeling a little bit sad because they had lost something very special to them. We talked about ways we could show kindness to our friends when we were sad.
Then Scarlette said “I’m hungry in dis car” because for some reason she feels the need to clarify her location to me whenever she feels hungry. She’ll say “I’m hungry in dis store” or “I’m hungry in dis backyard” or if we are at home “I’m hungry in my mouf.” So I was not totally sure how much of that deep conversation she had taken to heart.
Later that day when Scarlette saw one of my relatives crying she walked over, gave them a hug and then said “Oh yeah, you so sad! I sorry you lost. One time I lost my Elsa doll and I was so sad. Maybe my mommy can find it! She is bery good at finding fings.”
In fact, she hugged every single person she saw and later I said “You sure are a little hugger today! Are you just in a hugging mood?” And she said “Yeah, when our friends are sad we gib dem a hug.”
I am always telling stories on Scarlette, because she’s so mischievous but I should also tell y’all those kind of stories, the ones that show how she is kind-hearted and charming and wildly loving.
I was so proud of how sweet and well-mannered she was because sometimes I have big expectations for her and she is still such a little girl.
And in the middle of the funeral when we stood up to sing the congressional hymn I hiked Scarlette up on my hip, forgetting that I was wearing a dress with the buckle on it, and she said loudly “MOMMY DAT HURTING MY (*GASP*)!”
(I sat in the very back in case I needed to make a hasty exit for a reason, y’all. And I did.)
