Little Lillian is just at the end of her third year on this planet and one of the most fascinating developments of her disproportionately gigantic personality is how she interprets the world. Her knowledge is part inference, part imagination, and part…something else.
She has been infatuated with anatomy for a while now. Her fingers spend a fair amount of time studiously running along elbows or knees feeling for the bones under the skin. She does this to herself. She does it to tolerant others.
She’ll gladly share any info she thinks she knows about her physical self. Sometimes it’s pretty accurate; for example she will explain that bones help you to walk and without them, you would “just be on the floor a lot”.
Other times, her understanding is more abstract.
Last summer, Violet lost two teeth and by the second one Lily was more than a little envious of those tooth fairy visits.
“Oooh!” She carefully came over to me cradling something in her small, cupped hands. I assumed it was yet another ladybug, either real or imagined, because it’s invasive species season is always in full swing here in NOLA. But no.
It was a toenail.
Her toenail.
“Oh honey…that goes in the garbage-“
“NO! Put it in water so it can breathe!”
What..
“Then I can have MY teeth fall out. “
She also has some curious ideas about how she came into being.
A number of times she’s said that she misses being in my belly and asks things like, “Did I have bones and blood and fur in your tummy?” Well, yes.
On the actual act of being born she’s said, “When the doctor took my out of your tummy, I looked right at Daddy like this *gives me a three second blank faced, big-eyed stare* and he was like, ‘Awww!'” ( I have it on good authority that Mark was not, in fact, “like, ‘Awww!'”)
She even has thoughts on things that hopefully did not happen before she was born, or even in utero. ” I was dead before. A long time ago,” she casually mentioned while eating her pb&j one afternoon. ” A monster ate me up. And a crocodile.”
I asked her for more details on that one, but thankfully she didn’t have any and was more interested in playing with her tiny weird grocery shaped toys.
One day while I was getting her undressed, she told me to be careful when I tugged her shirt off. “I don’t want my skin to come off, ” she explained. “Then my fur will come out. And my blood. And then my skeleton will be out and I’ll just be a skeleton talking at you.”
“Your skeleton is not going to come out, ” I assured her.
“Well,” Violet chimed in, ” one day it will…”
YES THANK YOU VIOLET.
When we moved to the new place, the cat went into hiding. Finally after four days, I heard him meow in the hallway. “FINALLY! Did you hear that? It’s Fievel!”
Lily turned back to what she had been playing and said with a dismissive tone, “No, that wasn’t him that said that. That was just some bones and some blood talking.”
My child may be a secret wolf.
