I found some of those moments of quiet I was seeking this morning by sitting in a chair tonight and watching her cut with scissors for twenty minutes straight.
I put the camera on the table and occasionally snapped the shutter. Mostly I just watched (and listened). It’s funny how you can experience quiet moments even when listening to non-stop chatter.
The funniest part of the process was watching how she moves her mouth open and closed in the same way she moves the blades of the scissors. I scanned back through the photos on the camera to see if I caught it by chance in a series of stills. I hadn’t really – so I excused myself for a moment to grab the video camera. I caught it (and it’s hilarious) as well as catching quite a bit of the everyday chatter I hear from this girl. When she’s busy she narrates her actions. There are lots of ‘kays? expressed. “I’m going to get another sheet of paper. ‘Kay?” “These are sharp, ‘kay? So you can’t use them.”
After her second sheet of paper on the video, she announces she’s going to color. She hops up to get a third sheet of paper and then decides to go for the oversized paper that we store in a box under her sister’s bed. Instead of paper she finds a 2000 piece puzzle. I stopped the video just before the meltdown when I told her we could not work a 2000 piece puzzle of hot air balloons and a ton of plain blue sky before her bedtime.
But in case you feel as if you missed out… this is what the pleading face looks like around here.
“We do this puzzle, Mommy? Right now? ‘Kay?
