Piffanny

This is the photo that 5-year-old Piffanny took today



We took Rachel to the park today after a very rough morning -- she absolutely would not stop whining or crying, even when I took her down to the basement as I re-made the bed in the guest room with clean sheets. Drew was stripping turkey meat from the bones, the last step in the process of making turkey soup. When I brought her upstairs he snapped, "what is WRONG with her today?" I announced that I was going to take her for a walk, but before that I put her in her crib for a baby timeout while I went to the bathroom. And wonder of wonders, she fell asleep! It was around her naptime, so it made sense.

Then Drew went grocery shopping and I mopped the kitchen floor, which I had had been dying to get to. So now our house is really more or less back to normal. I also managed to read the paper a bit before Drew got back and Rachel woke up for lunch.

We raced to Laurelhurst Park, a lovely park within driving distance in southeast Portland, to take advantage of the sunny fall day. That's where I met a little girl named Piffany (at least that's what she said her name was). Rachel reached out to touch her face and she recoiled, which made me wonder if something bad had happened to her at home, or something. But somehow we ended up playing together, and she ended up taking a bunch of pictures of me with my camera. She said she was 5, but she looked more like 9. Drew said later he thought she seemed a bit developmentally delayed -- when I asked her whether she was in kindergarten, she said it wasn't time yet, or she wasn't ready. I couldn't remember.

We played a game of driving and groceries (she turned a wheel on the play structure and insisted that I carry some pretend groceries from the pretend grocery store to the car) and her mom thanked me for playing with her. Later, when she was on the see-saw with her mom and dad, I thanked her for taking such good pictures of me. (Really, they were great pictures and I have so few of me, they're all of Drew and Rachel because Drew's photography skills are next to zero). She said the next time she saw me at the park, she wanted to play hide-and-seek. I said I was looking forward to it.

It was kind of poignant. I have never thought of myself as a particularly child-friendly person; in fact, for a long time, babies were afraid of me. But maybe now that I'm a mom, kids sense that I'm ok. Kind of like Rachel was comfortable with Daniella and Molly -- she knows they're mommies and, therefore, they probablly know what they're doing.