A Whole Lot of Candles in the Wind

Today is Aunt Claudia's birthday and we're having a party for her at our house this evening. She is a rabid Elton John fan, so we invited a special guest...

UPDATE:

Elton is a big hit with his biggest fan...

Cloudy With a Chance of Mosquito Hawks

L & N: Mosquito hawk hunters extraordinaire

Had another run in with Crane flies this morning. I was up in those wonderful, savory, dark, early-morning hours, propped up in a well-stuffed chair, hot mug of Irish Breakfast tea in one hand, a Terry Pratchett novel in another - blissful abandonment of the world - or at least a deferment for an hour or two. Fully engrossed in the book, I was snapped out of my neonatal bliss when the corner of my eye recorded something shoot across the carpet next to my chair at a very high rate of speed. "Mouse or very, very large spider" was what those most primitive fight-or-flight nerve paths flashed instantly to my brain, leaving all thoughtful cognitive reasoning in the neurological dust. Eventually the reason train pulled languidly into the brain station and calmly reminded me that 1) mice generally don't hang out next to you when you are in a room, and 2) that would have to be a spider sprinter of Olympic caliber to blaze across the carpet like that. The less Neanderthal levels of my brain submitted a tasking order to legs to get down off the arm of the chair that I had inexplicably found myself standing on, and to my eyes to schedule some visual reconnaissance.
It took a while to get the focus right, but I soon discovered the source of my flighty apparition - "flighty" indeed being the operative word. Bumbling around the room was one of our old friends, a mosquito hawk. While engrossed in my book he had flown bumblingly by at shoulder level and to an eye not ready to deal with things requiring depth perception, seemed to race across the carpet by my chair. An unlikely fan of mosquito hawks I settled back down in my tea-soaked chair and let the adrenaline dissipate while I rejoined the less ridiculous story line in the Pratchett book.

An hour or two later I received the company I usually get on sleepy Saturday mornings. N curled up under the blanket I had stretched over my legs and L bounced around the room, bustling about, poking and prodding at it as if she had never been there before and it was all new and unexpected. L kind of reminds me of a bumbling mosquito hawk sometimes. A very large, substantial mosquito hawk - you really know it when she blunders into you. It didn't take long before my first born mosquito hawk identified this morning's version.

"Ahhhhhh!" she screamed and immediately ran over to the sliding patio door, flinging it open wide.

"L, it's just a mosquito hawk. They don't hurt you," I said.

"It's probably scared," she said, recovering herself somewhat. "I'm only letting it out!" But the tone of her voice indicated that she was not likely doing it purely for the sake of the insect's delicate nerves.

"All you're letting out by standing there fanning your arms is the well-heated air that I was basking in. Please shut the door."

L closed the door and N, roused from his undercover operations, joined L in following the mosquito hawk in its meandering path about the room. "We can keep it as a pet!" he suggested.

"We already have Mitt," reminded L, referring to our election-year acquisition of a pet newt.

"That's OK. We can keep it." N is all love and charity. "What should we call it?"

L thought for a moment and then it was clear she had an answer.

Quick tangent: I have discovered, probably not being the first person to do so, that there is a fundamental principle at work in the universe. You may know either what a child is going to say, but not when, so it hangs like the sword of Damocles over your head (e.g. "I caught Daddy using up all of Mommy's bubble bath last night!"). Or you may know when a child is going to say something but not exactly what (e.g. when the lady with the particularly big, prominent, hairy mole on the end of her nose sits down next to you in a waiting room). It is impossible to ever know both what a child is going to say and when she's going to say it. I call it the Humiliation Uncertainty Principle. Fortunately it is not always humiliating. Sometimes it's just odd.

"What should we call it?" asked N.

L thought for a moment and then it was clear she had an answer.

"I know," she said, as she gathered all her vast quantities of randomness unto herself. "We'll call him Meatballs!"

Mitt and Meatballs, welcome to the Perkins family menagerie!

Dancing the Years Away

Two years ago I took L to her first Daddy/Daughter Dance at the YMCA.  Last year we went again.  If it takes three times to make something a tradition, we hit the mark on Saturday night.  Every year my date has gotten bigger, and, sad to say, not particularly more graceful.  Each year finds her struggling to figure out exactly how to negotiate all the extra inches that have accumulated on her ever stretching frame, and she's growing far faster than her spacial awareness.  Her idea of dancing hasn't evolved much.  It is still pretty much encompassed by spinning under my arm at RPMs not justified by any tempo of any of the music being played, and there are still way too many elbows and feet being flung out in random and potentially blunt-force trauma-inducing directions.  But her heart is in it and she drags her weary father to the floor dance after dance with a savage and unrelenting, if somewhat unfocused passion.  I, on the other hand, who have also accumulated a few more inches over the years, have little to offer in the grace and dexterity department; my hopes and confidence in L's future femme fetal blossoming lies entirely in the 50% of the gene pool contributed by her Mother - we're praying for strong maternal chromosomes!

The dance lasted from 6:00 to 8:00. My cyclone in white chiffon never flagged, but my energy waned thirty minutes in.  While the first hour ticked off at an acceptable pace, the 7-8 stretch seemed to do just that.  I would glance over to the clock in between dodges of under-arm pirouettes and find that the minute hand was stubbornly refusing to get on with things.  "Ahhh! - but these are the moments I'll treasure," I told myself.  "I'll look back fondly on these brief snippets of time and get all misty-eyed and maudlin," I reminded myself.  But I would always hear myself answering back:  "Then lets get this over with so I can start the reminiscing!"

And I was right.  Now, two days on, I'm sitting here thinking how my little girl is all grown up.  The cramps in my sore back are easing up, so I'm much more inclined to look back fondly on the evening and regret my hasty attitude.  Feet which no longer shoot waves up pain up my leg want to grab the girl and waltz the night away.  Some day.  Probably next year.  Or the year after that.  Or in a couple - when she's finally all grace and beauty in her white chiffon and I dance my last dance with her before handing her over to some other Neanderthal in a tux.