1 Mother 2 Another

Cora’s creative side has been
blossoming over the past several months: she started with stickers
(still a huge passion for her), covering page after page with
stickers of any kind – didn’t matter to her, as long as
they stuck. Then she began noticing Maddie would make colored marks
on paper, and Cora turned to coloring pencils. Every Sunday, the
girls carry their own bag of colored pencils for drawing while we
rehearse music before the service. At first having a hard time
holding the pencils, Cora has adapted well and now scribbles with
glee.


But neither stickers nor pencils capture her attention for long now
– her fickle heart has fallen in love with a new medium.
Crayons.


But not for the reason you might think.

Sure, crayons glide smoothly over paper
and leave rich, satisfying colors behind. But more than anything
else, crayons are stuffy, overdressed sticks simply crying out to
be liberated.


Or so Cora believes.


Yes, my daughter has never met a crayon she didn’t like
– naked. She simply cannot hold a crayon in her hand without
trying to “take off its clothes”. My girl has denuded
every crayon in her little bag, and has turned covetous eyes on
Maddie’s bag. Madeleine, no fool she, has taken to clutching
her bag possessively and running away when she sees Cora’s
speculative gaze fall too closely; she’ll run desperately,
saying, “No, Cora! I want my crayons to have their clothes
on!”


Cora’s reluctant ecdysiasts have suffered predictable wounds;
there’s hardly any naked crayon still in one piece. And for
whatever reason (perhaps because she’s only two!) Cora still
doesn’t see the correlation between her denuded crayons and
their weakened, unable-to-stay-whole state.


I think this compulsion is less about a desire to see “under
the clothes” and more about a yen for spare, utilitarian
orderliness – she simply wants to clean away all the
extraneous and, um, strip down to the bare minimum. I
wouldn’t be too concerned – she’s worked her way
through all the crayons within her reach, so it can’t get
worse – except that she’s turned her strip-tease
tendencies towards other objects. Cora now tries to peel labels off
jars, tear “extra” pieces off paper, and more.
I’d come upon an old Soviet stamp, unmarked and pre-Berlin
Wall fall, stuck safely on a spare piece of paper. I narrowly saved
it from being shredded when Cora almost got there first.


So to all my friends, you’ve been warned – lock up your
crayons.


Or Cora will set them free.