Izzy:"Daddy, I'm cold. Real cold."
Daddy:"I'm not surprised. It's cold out. Cold and damp...it's the kind of cold that goes right through you. Gets right into your bones." (I felt a little like Quint from Jaws as I spoke of the cold)
Izzy: "I've been eating snow! BELCH."
I hate winter. Loathe it. But the kids love it as all kids seem to. Izzy and the Boy are both at home in it and they both seem impervious to the cold. A trait which came from neither Mrs. Narrator or I.
Now sometime during the summer months, Isobel got a donation bag of clothes from one of the kids she used to go to daycare with. Before we get cards and letters asking about our financial situation, the donations have been happening for as long as Izzy has been in day care and to anyone who is the parent of a little girl that changes her outfits as much as Izzy does, it's a godsend.
In this particular bag of clothes, were two snow suits. The girl who donated these clothes, though older, is not much bigger than Izzy so I was a little perplexed when out came not one but two snowsuits that were big enough to fit her and my daughter both...Since the arrival of these suits, Isobel has spoken of virtually nothing but winter and snowmen and snow angels.
Are snow angels snow men that are dead? she asked me.
"Sure are." I said. But I had to step back and ponder the brilliance of this line of thinking. I had never heard this question before nor thought of it myself...it's scary sometimes just how smart she really is...
"Daddy?" she began.
"Yes my delicate tulip?" I replied.
"Daddy what's dead?" she asked...
So for the remainder of the summer and all through the fall and Indian summer and fall again that seemed to go on forever, Izzy's willing it to happen finally did and the snow fell. I picked her up from school and she could barely contain the excitement of being able to make a snow angel, her very first.
She ran from the car on a direct course to an open snowy spot in the backyard, her gigantic snow suit threatening to swallow her up as she ran.
"Weeeeeeee-hawwww!" she yelled as she ran.
She walked around for a bit, like a dog flattening it's bed and then proceeded to flop on her back and begin top move her arms and legs. Giggling and laughing as she did it. And then a scream ripped the air.
"Daddy!" she screamed. "Daddy! Daddy!!!!!!!!!!"
Horrid things flashed momentarily through my mind until I realized, thins was our backyard. How much danger could she possibly be in. Still I hurried to see what was wrong.
"Daddy!" she bellowed and cried again, worry in her voice. It must have seemed forever, the minute and half it took me to walk from my car to where she was in the back yard
There she lay, on her back like a cross between a turtle and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon. Gigantic tears mixing with clumps of snow running down her face. I leaned over her and I could see the nervous excitement and fear and exuberance all crossing her face. It was an amusing picture.
"What's the problem, baby doll?" I asked.
She looked around and whispered, "I can't get up."
My favourite time with Izzy are story times at bedtime. Not because I love reading to my kids...which I do but because I have tried over the years to warp the behaviour of my children with the stories I read them. It is my right as a parent to deceptively try to get my children to do my bidding.
If there is a part of the story where a character does something particularly rude, I will insert a more polite scenario. For example, the Big Bad Wolf used to knock on the door and wait to be invited in and Goldilocks always cleaned up after herself before she left the house. O.K. so neither kid actually ever bought it and I stopped doing it. But I figured if it worked just once, then what the hell?
One night I figured I would give it a go again to see what happened. We were reading "Pinkalicious", one of Izzy's favourite books about a little girl who becomes obsessed with the pink cupcakes she and her mother made and eats so many of them, she turns pink. In my telling of the story however, every time she does something she's not supposed to, I read that she either did what she was supposed to or that she did the wrong thing and knew she would have to live with the consequences.
Izzy kept looking at the front of the book and back to me.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Is that what it really says? That's not what Mommy said when she read it. Is that really what it says?"
"Oh yes," I said magnanimously.
"Who wrote this book?" she asked indignantly.
"Why?" I asked
"This book sucks."
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