Around the World in 80 Naps

Recently, Elsbeth has taken off in terms of her speech and motor skills. Almost every day I look at her and marvel at how this little girl, this beautiful little girl was once the hairy baby that popped out 'O my womb looking like a baby bird.

The conversations we have, if you can call them that, are the highlight of my days and it is very difficult not to commend her on some of the shrewd and manipulative things she tries to pull over on me and Jeremy.

One of the more recent things she has taken to is spontaneous napping anywhere and anytime. These speed naps consist of her trying out any new textural surface, lying prostrate on the ground with her eyes firmly squeezed shut, the effort of which itself looks to be exhausting enough to require a nap, and the statement: I take nap here. It lasts only a few seconds usually because I am harping like a nervous chicken about germs and yucky, yucky stuff on the ground.

This fear of mine comes from a very traumatic experience I had as a child of about eight. While walking through a parking lot in Baltimore behind my parents, I spotted what appeared to be the nipple to a baby's bottle on the ground. We were very poor at the time and so I was up for anything that I could use as a toy. I picked it up and held it and couldn't wait to get home and play house with my dolls. When we got back in the car I had time to better examine this new found prize. Upon further inspection I discovered that the lip of the nipple unrolled and so I began to unroll it. It kept unrolling and I held it up to ask my parents what kind of balloon I had found.

They just about ran the car into a ditch trying to extract the thing from my hands and heave it like the plague from our car. Apparently I had not in fact discovered the nipple to a baby's bottle, but rather a condom. A. Used. Condom. Although I did not know what a condom was at that time (bless my innocent little soul), I knew the thing had felt slimy and my parents were significantly freaking out, so it must be a pretty nasty thing. And that readers is why, to this day I HATE condoms, AND dirty parking lots. But mostly just condoms because that day I essentially unknowingly touched someone's penis, AND vagina, or colon, however you want to look at it.

Wow, what a tangent! So as Ellie prefers lying on hard, man-made surfaces for these naps of hers, I keep insisting that this is asphalt, hot and yucky while that grass over there is green and soft and made just for feet and heads to rest upon, all to no avail.

I have managed to capture a few photos of this phenomenon known as the quirkiness of childhood. And the fact that I don't very often have a camera with me and yet I still have several of these photos should be a testament as to just how often she does this.