Piper likes cantaloupe. A lot. She wants it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And snack, too.
“Mom, I’m the cantaloupe whisperer,” she reported yesterday, stroking a melon in the grocery store aisle.
“Really? What do you tell them?”
Piper knocked on the melon. She sniffed it. “You can’t hear me. That’s the whisperer part.”
Piper is addicted to Reading Rainbow these days.
While she was sick last weekend she asked to download the Reading Rainbow app on the Ipad. Piper knows how to do these things.
“Dad, I’ll need your Itunes password,” Piper said.
“No way,” Dad said.
“That’s fine. I already know what it is.”
“Really? What is it, Piper? Let’s see.”
“Duh,” said Piper, “it’s uppercase, lowercase, hyphen, uppercase, lowercase, dash.”
Piper’s had a rough week. Stitches. Falls. Fevers. Step Throat. It keeps getting worse. There was also an outbreak of lice in her classroom. On the bright side, Piper doesn’t have lice. So, there’s that, right? Considering she spent a good part of the week in and out of doctor’s offices and on and off our couch, catching lice was low on her list of possibilities. Poor Piper.
Luckily, she figured out what’s been causing her bad luck. She told me all about it this morning.
“Mom, I know why my fever was so high?”
“You do? Why?”
“I don’t want to say it out loud so I’m going to spell it for you.”
“Okay, Piper. I’m ready.”
Piper then used her finger to write J-O-E in the air. That happens to be her father’s name.
“Really? Your dad caused your fever?”
“No, Mom. I spelled Junie. You know, my favorite stuffed animal. Junie.” (Junie stars in most of Piper’s pictures. You can see her illustrated here.)
“Actually, you spelled J-O-E.”
“Whatever. The point is that I think Junie has strep throat. She keeps giving it to me.”
“Huh.”
“Or I’m getting all sweaty because of all those stuffed animals. I’m sleeping with like fifty of those things. I can barely breathe in there, you know.”
Dear Grown Up Piper,
Once upon a time in kindergarten you fell down. You might remember it. You tripped over Daniel’s foot and landed on your chin. It was a gaping cut. Your poor teacher was traumatized. An ER visit later, you were the proud bearer of four stitches.
A week later you fell again. You busted open the SAME stitches. I swear it’s true. Daniel’s foot was nowhere in sight. You were running in your socks during P.E. Even though I write fiction, I can’t make stuff like this up. Again, back to the doctor. They recommended more stitches.
Here’s the part that you may now be blaming me for. I didn’t let them stitch you back up. There was no medical reason to do so. New stitches would have been purely cosmetic. I did take you to the eye doctor for a full exam. I also had your hearing and ears checked. I also took you to your pediatrician. You’re fine. You’re silly. You bounce around a lot. You fall. You seem rather resilient.
If all of your supermodel dreams have been crushed by now and if you’ve been turned away by potential suitors because of the scar underneath your chin that no one can see, it’s my fault. Blame me. When you’re a mom, you might understand.
Love,
Mom
I like to make lists. I’m a Virgo with German heritage. Let’s just say I prefer order to chaos. But I also like to put a little something fun on my list of drudgery. Here’s my list for today:
1. Grade 15 research proposals
2. Update course grades in Blackboard
3. Summer course design
4. Email FWR transcript
5. Meet with Caron
Did you see what I did just there? I don’t have to meet with Caron. I get to. We’ll go to a fancy French cafe and pretend to talk about a conference proposals. We’ll laugh and gossip. It’s work. Of course it is. But it’s also a little fun on my to-do list.
I do the same on Sissy and Piper’s chore list. Check out chore number 3.
That’s right. Making music is required in our house. Daily. You have a choice, though. Sissy can practice piano, guitar, or flute. She’s a three instrument kind of girl. Piper can play her drums, bongos, tambourine, or sing. Making music is so much more interesting can cleaning out your lunch box or setting the dinner table. Both have to be done, of course, but somehow the not-so-fun becomes more fun when there is a carrot waving in front of your face. Even with the incentive, Piper tries to find creative ways to get out of being told what to do.
“If I set the table in the American Girl world, does that count as a chore?”
“No, Piper. It doesn’t. We can’t all eat at the American Girl table. Can we?”
“If I eat all my food and lick out my lunch containers, does that count as clean?”
“No, Piper. It doesn’t. That doesn’t sound very hygienic.”
“If I sing to my stuffed animals with my microphone, does that count as Making Music?”
“Yes. I think it does.”
We have to let something slide.
This ones probably my favorite. This is Piper, Sissy, and me dancing at the beach. And there is a mermaid swimming below us. She’s enjoying the shine from the three suns, too. You can never have enough sunshine. That pink and yellow stacked thing is a bento box. We like to take our sushi with us wherever we go. 
Need more Life Illustrated? Click here.
Piper is a very brave girl. She even has a badge Sissy made her to prove it. See:
How did she earn her brave girl status? Four stitches in her chin. A trip to the ER. Again.
Piper is prone to accidents. I usually just glue her back together. I blogged about my preferred brand of kid glue here. But not even my superglue could mend this nasty gape. Her pediatrician took one look at it and shook his head. Nope. The Emergency Room.
She hardly shed a tear. I told Piper she didn’t have to be so brave. “I know,” Piper said, “I just am.”
I know what you’re thinking. What crazy thing was Piper doing to bust open her precious face? Hanging from the monkey bars? Playing with broken glass? No. Walking. She was walking across the floor in her classroom. Dangerous, right? She was so excited to show Mrs. A her work that she didn’t notice Daniel’s foot hanging out in the aisle. She hit so hard Mrs. A was convinced she wouldn’t have any teeth left. A concussion was mentioned. Poor baby. Poor teacher.
She even got a cool plastic bracelet from the hospital WITH HER NAME ON IT.
“Don’t cut off my bracelet, Mom, whatever you do,” Piper said.
“You want to keep wearing it?”
“Of course. The other kids will think it’s so cool. Then I’ll get lots of attention for my stitches. Kids love that stuff.”
We’re waiting for snow in D.C. Sissy and Piper have been staring at their sleds for two years waiting. I think our wait is over.
“We might get a foot of snow, P!” Sissy said on our walk home from school.
“A foot?”
“Yeah. That’s a lot.”
“Not really,” Piper said. “My foot is kind of small.”
“Mom, I think I need a haircut!”
“Really, Piper? How come? I thought you wanted to grow it out like Rapunzel.”
“This morning when I was sitting on the toilet I leaned by head way back and I could touch the water with my hair. I could also do that when I leaned way forward.”
“You really shouldn’t do that, P. It’s toilet water.”
“Yeah. I figured you were going to say that.”
A Piper likes a snack. According to her, snacking is one of her favorite hobbies. She takes a snack to school every day. She looks forward to snack time all day. She keeps a spare snack in the car. She’s never without. So we made up a little shelf in the kitchen so Piper could pack her own snack. It’s on a low shelf just for Piper. Her selection looks pretty healthy, doesn’t?
Tamari almonds. Trail mix. Peanut butter pretzels. Carob cashews. Seaweed.
Piper would be quite the health nut except…she really just likes to lick all the tamari and salt off of those almonds and peel off the sugar peanut butter parts from the pretzels. Trail mix? Piper prefers to pick out the chocolate bits. Sometimes a raisin gets in her mouth by accident.
The seaweed? She devours it. She can’t get enough. Piper doesn’t care what the other kids say at snack time and they say plenty about her love of seaweed. Her snack loves her and that’s enough for Piper.
piperism 