Dear Livia,

You sit beside me at the dining room this Sunday morning. Adele is blaring on the stereo and you want to know what rumor it is she sings of. I manage to evade this question as I’m not prepared to explain the intricacies of love lost and found to my first grader quite yet. You are pouring acrylic paints onto plastic lids, mixing colors to paint onto t-shirts. The dining room table is littered with paint bottles, colored pencils and, alarmingly, electronics. Perhaps this isn’t a wise configuration of projects, but it serves its purpose in keeping us close to one another as we express ourselves creatively. The dog is perched nearby in his bed, sending indignant small barks at the people who dare walk by a nearby sidewalk. I stop between nearly every sentence I type to prevent you from painting the dining room table, your wrists, the floor and your jammies. Your enthusiasm for crafts is matched only by your remarkable knack for knocking things over. Yes, you are now painting with your fingers. I tell people that you’d roll your entire body in paint if I let you and I’m not always sure they believe me. I want to encourage this need to physically create, your desire to touch and smear, to feel the paint between your fingers. It requires deep breathing for me to let you get messy and you probably haven’t noticed, but a lot of our projects wrap up quickly when the deep breathing no longer helps. Then again, you are now a big kid and can clean up fairly well on your own. How much fun this growing older thing is. I delight in you, growing girl of mine.

Love,
Mom