If Wishes Were Lightbulbs…
As a holiday gift, I bought The Girl a light-up replica of the moon. It now hangs from a small nail on her bedroom wall. Its diameter is roughly thirty centimeters of textured, semi-translucent plastic and via a variety of functions on the included remote control can be selectively backlit to replicate eight phases of lunar illumination. Clicking her moon into just the right phase has become an indespensible part of our evening bedtime routine, fitting naturally and somewhere between the second of two storybook recitals and the charging-with-a-flashlight of the glow-in-the-dark stars clinging to her ceiling.
Tonight we are chatting under a waning crecent and eerie, green luminescence of five-pointed stickies.
“Can we play our question game again, Daddy?” She asks, tucked tightly into bed, throttling the helpless plush doll — her inseparable Lucy — under the crook of her arm.
“Do you have some questions ready?” I ask. I’m tracing my fingers lightly across her forehead to brush the hair from her eyes. “Good questions?”
She nods.
One could hardly call it creative brilliance in the art of game design, but as far as parenting tactics it has been nothing short of a sleeper hit. The Girl loves it despite — or perhaps because — that the rules are so ridiculously simple: she can ask me three questions, no more and no less, about absolutely any thought, idea or curiosity that happens to be cluttering her little mind — and I will answer her as honestly and thoroughly as I my own cluttered mind can muster. That’s it. That’s our game.
Our breakfast cereal is narrated by the morning news while the Girl is dripping honey down the front of her pajamas. But then such a mess is nothing compared to usual coverage of overseas protests, international economics, and local traffic reports that have been following a late-night snow on the already icy streets.