Bracing for Disaster

If you are the owner of a china shop and have in recent months noticed you might have misplaced a bull, please contact me.  I'm pretty sure I've found it.

I'm not sure exactly when the transformation occurred.  I trust it must have been gradual, but it sure seemed to be rather instantaneous from my perspective.  I used to have a sweet, demure, gentle, kind, loving and compassionate daughter.  Now I provide food and shelter to a small cataclysmic force of nature that an insurance policy would likely refer to as an "act of God."

Disaster with dimples.
Destruction in dungarees.

If this is what the global climate change people are trying to warn us about, then they've way undersold their case.  L is the perfect double-threat:  she's developed a dense little athlete's body that is solid muscle and gumption, which diabolically aligns with an absolute and truly stunning clumsiness, the description of which can't be done justice with mere comparisons to new-born deer.  (More like a new-born John Deere.)  Don't get me wrong; I suspect there's still love and affection buried in there somewhere, but it can't seem to express itself unless it's driven home by an across-the-room full-body tackle.  N spends most of his waking hours crying from some onslaught, or hiding from the next one.

I'm sure at some point grace and poise will once again assert itself in her otherwise randomly oscillating collection of knees and elbows.  It's just going to be a trauma-filled race between her motor-mellowing and our encroaching osteoporosis.