Imagine, for a brief moment, that you are the parent of a small child. Imagine that she awakens at midnight, unwell and disoriented. Imagine that you bring her downstairs into the living room and administer various and sundry types of medication.
Now tell me. How do you explain to this child that it is, in fact, still the same night, and she is not, in fact, entitled to a new round of stories and a fresh bottle before bedtime?
Yeah, we couldn't convince her, either.
Matt: What's the little girl's name?
Sasha: Sasha!
Matt: What's the man's name?
Sasha: Matt.
Matt: What's the woman's name?
Sasha: *no response*
Matt: What's the woman's name? *pause* Mommy is the woman, what's her name?
Sasha: No, mommy is a lady.
The other day, Sasha wanted to wear jeans. She owned exactly one pair of jeans, and we could not locate them. Not in the dresser, not in the dirty laundry, nowhere. It was a crisis. I have yet to find them, days later.
That night, we went to purchase additional jeans for her at The Children's Place. Lo, for she discovered the Sparkly Jeans! She was in an ecstasy of two-year-old sartorial pride.
There have been unforeseen consequences.
Thanks to the magic and wonder of Sasha's Sparkly Ass*, we have now been privileged to welcome a number of other items to our home, such as the Sparkly Sofa, Sparkly Living-Room Rug, and now, fresh from the washer, Daddy's Sparkly Dark Blue Sweater.
Seriously, somebody needs to start pointing this stuff out to me.
* Grandma, I'm sorry I used the word "ass." I'll try to restrain myself next time.
As of today, Sasha has clearly and unquestionably surpassed me in intellect. This is an event a parent hopes will someday occur, but preferably not until you are done arguing about allowances and curfews. It bodes very ill for me that it has happened so early in my child's life.
Allow me to explain.
This morning, as I was helping Sasha get ready for her day, she held up one foot in the air and said "This is my left foot." Then she held up the other and said "This is my right foot." She looked at me expectantly. She was, of course, correct.
I asked her to identify her left and right hands, ears, elbows, knees, eyes... she got it all. People, I am not capable of differentiating left from right with such a high degree of confidence, nor at such a rate of speed, nor with such accuracy.
Clearly Sasha is a super-genius baby, and will grow up to cure cancer, solve the problem of world hunger, and also will fashion a Grand Unification Theory so elegant that even laymen will weep at its beauty. There can be no other explanation.
Especially not any explanation that begins with me failing to master skills any grade-school child can display. Nosirree. No way. Not going to happen.
I've been taking some very precisely calculated steps lately to take control of a lot of areas in my life I've been neglecting. This isn't a New Year's thing, mind you; more like the natural evolution of a process that began in earnest in November.
At any rate, one of the things I've reclaimed has been my writing. I've been working on a particular novel off and on for quite some time. I had hit around 200 pages, decided a lot of it just wasn't going where I wanted, cut 60 pages, wrote a little more, and then dropped the project pretty much entirely.
I'm working on this particular project again, and it makes me so happy. I'd lost track of some of the last round of changes I'd made, and after doing a review of my material, I can hardly contain myself. The story has taken a solid shape, and has practically started writing itself. My premise and world mechanics are hanging together. My missing bits where the plot hand-waving occurred are filling themselves in. I've also got some really fine writing in there, and I'm incredibly proud of all of it.
One of my big concerns has been whether the story was complex enough to hit publishable-novel length (because, let's face it, who's reading novellas?). Now, I have no fear I'm going to hit a publishable mark, and I may even exceed that and have a second chance to prune some more of the weaker material.
Whether it ever gets published is, of course, another matter entirely, and I'm trying to not concern myself with it at this point. The most important thing is to finish. That'll be an accomplishment all on its own, regardless of any other accolades I might seek.
Yesterday morning, Sasha woke up at 6:15am because she fell out of bed. Today, she slept in. Hilarity ensues.
Matt: You slept in really late this morning.
Me: Yeah, we're very glad!
Sasha, brightly: I didn't fall on my head!
Us: *die laughing*
Sasha: Mommy and daddy, very happy!
Matt: Yes, we are always very happy when you don't fall on your head.