She's Always Cracked Me Up
“I not only have chicken legs but now I smell like a chicken,” deadpan voice, Tate’s big eyes looking at me seriously as her wet shower hair drips onto her tightly held fists holding up the new gray towel she, for some reason, despises.
“Hahaha"!” I guffaw, spitting all over her which breaks her concentrated complaint. I’m laughing so hard. She can’t help then but giggle as she takes her towel up over her face to wipe my spit off it.
Ever since I got the new gray towels, she’s sworn they smell like poultry. I’ve tried to solve for it. Did I cook or burn chicken the night I brought them home? Did they need an extra wash from perhaps stinky packaging?
I ran them through an extra load. But, she can’t get over it, even if it is now maybe just a memory from a first sniff (I certainly don’t smell it).
It’s just her delivery, her dry, witty humor. It gets me. And, I get her …
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I’d worked with so many pregnant moms having been a birth doula and talked to them all about connecting during the perinatal months with their little one inside. I’d give them small practices for doing so.
When I was pregnant with Tate, I, too, practiced these techniques - channeling color from my heart to hers and feeling that back-and-forth flow between us. I’d talk to her, sing to her. I’d place my palm on my belly and send my breath to her...
But the one thing I’m reminded of in these times when my daughter cracks me up so effortlessly is the way she made me laugh, even way back when, while she was in my tummy.
It’s true.
I’d be reading and suddenly, laugh out loud. At nothing. Seemingly out of the blue. I’d feel ticklish somehow or could almost hear what her little hilarious voice would sound like. Feel her knowing, what she was doing - cracking me up.
I saw an intuitive while I was pregnant who, without me sharing any of this, assured me the one thing she could see about my child was her sharp sense of humor.
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So many million examples. The things she says. The choices she makes.
Insisting on Tuesdays being backward day, starting in preschool, when she wears all her clothes backward - yep even her undies.
Sticking googly-eyes earrings to her earlobes every morning for school, as close to getting her ears pierced as she could get. For eight straight months.
“I think that number is yogaspicious, Mommy.” (Having clearly meant auspicious).
“I love it when it’s room temperature outside.”
I could go on and on. Luckily, I keep a notebook of at least the ones I remember to jot down. She loves to go back through and hear me read them to her, and laugh all over again.
Let your children crack you up. Loudly.
