With Child...

No, not me! I am not "with child", but I did get to have a slumber party with my goddaughter Maddie. Maddie is now five years old (not really five and half, as she suggested, since her birthday was last month). She is a big fan of the Bear Hut, my parents' house at Mount Hood. After a lovely outing at the park with her mom, sisters, and Grammy, she suggested wistfully how nice it would be to get to sleep in the bunkbeds at the Bear Hut and go swimming...I repeat, wistfully. My parents didn't mind, since they were headed up to prepare for my dad's golf tournament on Sunday (the Gripit 'n' Ripit Challenge), but we drove up separately to come back early on Sunday. (Now that I am not a teen babysitter, I don't quite have the stamina for a whole day with no naps!) Plus, I was meeting up with my friend West from Gonzaga in the afternoon. In between Maddie's comments that "it doesn't usually take this long to get there" and questions of whether or not my mom really told me how to get there, we told stories. I had to make up stories that had to be sufficiently long or they didn't count. She told me she didn't know how to make up stories, so I asked her to tell me some stories she knows. She loves "Peter and the Wolf", so she told a lovely, brief rendition of the story, going back to fill in details she remembered later. The best line was the last: "The hunters put the wolf in a cage and took him deep into the woods and came back and celebrated with cake and ice cream and broccoli and vegetables and fruit and things that are good for you." I think the broccoli, et al, was for my sake, since she knows that I, like her mom, am a vegetarian that likes healthy food. The drive was a bit long. We had to turn around to get keys for my parents at one point. But we also stopped at a weigh station when Maddie exclaimed, "I have to go pee-pees really, really bad." We were eight minutes from the house. We stopped and dropped trou' along the highway, a very well-lit portion incidentally. The stage-fright was too much, and we had to get back in the car. I guessed the eight minutes exactly; unfortunately, Maddie asked if I could make it in three. (Amy and Pat, I was a good driver and took all eight minutes.) The whole trip up brought such an incredible awareness to me of the responsibility of driving with a small child strapped in the back seat. I caught myself driving under the speed limit, just being so conscientious of her and my responsibility for her safety. Children are such wonderful blessings, and they make our human frailty even more pronounced. How grateful I am for my goddaughter, who reveals God to me in little ways!