A few stories

I'm always putting up photos and video here, because I have a deep-seated paranoia that people only want that multimedia stuff and mere writing will never get read. But there's a few stories that I want to write down before I forget them, so take it or leave it.

Story #1: Several weeks ago, Isadora and I were reading a book in which a girl has her appendix taken out, and she shows off her scar to her classmates (the book is Madeline) . Izza asked me why the girl had a scar on her stomach and I tried to explain how the doctor had to cut it open to get the appendix out. Then, reaching for a real world example, I explained that both of Isadora's cousins were delivered via C section, which required a cutting open of her aunt Sara's belly. As I was explaining this, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be walking myself into a conversation I wasn't quite ready to have. But before I could worry too much about that, Isadora frowned at the idea of her aunt Sara being cut open, and said, "But when we got Arlo from the hospital, all I had to do was open the door!"

Story #2: As one of a rotating number of songs that I sing to Isadora before bed, I've started including "Puff The Magic Dragon." And the first few times I sang it to her, I wondered what she made of the line, "Dragons live forever, but not so little boys." Then, one night, I got to that line, and Izza suddenly interrupted me in her typically breathless, stuttering, interrupting way to say, "Dinosaurs don't live forever either. They all died and then they turned into skeletons and then they turned into bones and then dogs ate them. So now they're just pretend dinosaurs." We had discussed the extinction of dinosaurs a few times at this point, but I loved how she connected it to this song. A few days later, I walked into the living room to find Isadora and Nancy playing on the couch. Izza was pretending to be an asteroid crashing into the earth, and after she crashed, Nancy held up her pretend dinosaur hands, let out a dinosaur shriek, and fell dead on the couch. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Story #3: Last night, Izza called me into her bedroom when she should have been sleeping. I expected her to come up with some weird thing to fix, like the angle of the chair across from her bed, but instead she said, "I have a friend in my bedroom. She's a bug." I asked her where the bug was, and she didn't know. So we turned on the light and looked around and eventually found a ladybug (or perhaps an Asian beetle) in the corner. I told her I was going to put it outside, but Izza protested, "She's my friend! I want to sleep with her!" So as a compromise, I put the ladybug in a tupperware container and told Izza she could see it in the morning. And that's what she wanted to do as soon as the sun came up. So we went in the living room and I let her hold the tupperware jar. She has had a terrible cough lately, so she was intermittently coughing as she told the bug repeatedly, "You're so cute! You're SO cute!" Nancy had just woken up as well, and she walked into the room in the middle of one of Izza's coughing fits. As soon as she recovered, Izza looked up, held out her hand toward the tupperware jar like someone introducing a princess, and said in a cough-ridden but extremely polite voice, "Have you met my ladybug?"