The Magical Mystery Tour

Sometimes Claire is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma packed inside a 36" high adorable package. Like a spicy jalapeno pepper stuffed with delicious cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. More so, Claire's like the turducken of cuteness. Oh oh, I'm running out of metaphors. Plus, I'm having a Homer Simpson moment and craving a bacon-wrapped fillet mignon with a jelly-filled donut for dessert? And The Donut Shop in Pierre, SD, has the best donuts on the planet. Is that place even open anymore? I should check into that next month when I'm back home, but I digress.  The point I'm trying to make is that trying to figure out the motivations of a 3-1/2 year old makes my head hurt... and sometimes drives me to binge eating. Thankfully, I know of no donut shops in the immediate vicinity of our home.

So take, for example, the incident that just occurred not more than five minutes ago when Claire entered the office walking backwards - her shorts pulled down to her knees and her butt sticking out - and declared, "I don't think I wiped good upstairs." After just a glance, I can tell you this was an understatement and would require my fetching the hazmat suit from the mudroom closet. It seems like only yesterday Claire was running around pooping in a diaper because she was "scared to poo on the potty!" Now, she's like a ninja and sneaks off to perform a stealth pooping session. But when I find Claire doing her impersonation of a carpet cleaner using her butt to scoot across the floor, it doesn't take me long to figure out she recently pooped. What can I say? I've always been pretty quick. But it always ends this way, so why wouldn't she just ask me to help her out to avoid all the discomfort? I mean, I don't like to brag, but I'm somewhat of a legend around here when it comes to using the toilet.

And then there was the time last week when she asked if she could use the "safety scissors" to cut paper. I won't get into the details, but the story ends with me finding little clumps of hair on the living room floor. Fortunately for Bogey, it wasn't his hair. I guess I should have known that when a toddler says "I want to cut paper" she really means "I'm going to cut chunks of hair out of the back of my head in a manner where there's no humanly possible way you can repair it."

But Claire makes every day new, exciting and fresh. Well, maybe "fresh" isn't always the best term to use, but you get my drift. Now more Claire posing with Linda's Mother's Day gift...