wise seven

Coline is not the only one growing faster than our eyes can see. Leila is a newly discovered inconditional fan of shaking it off along with Taylor Swift and keeping her feet off the ground or up in the air. How white should door frames really aim to be? She likes playing dames and drinking grape juice in wine glasses in the evening, making breakfast for the younger ones after jumping on the trampoline on Saturday mornings while I am still in bed. Oh, and she´s and got the whole nail fashion under control, including not biting hers anymore. Life is pretty smooth around here since we accepted week-end schemes that include at least one friend sleepover. Loosing her top front teeth suddenly seem to have made way for words of wisdom and a better understanding of our needs as her parents and we now can enjoy the full potential of her fiery and sensitive personnality.

We see each other every single day, many hours a day, and yet all of a sudden we get slapped in the face with the realization of how big they have gotten. Yesterday one of them or both would come to my bed almost every night, they would ask me to sing lullabies until they were fast asleep. Now Coline starts asking on Monday afternoon to please go for a sleep over at her friend´s.

How her first sleep over happened is quite a story. She left home one saturday afternoon and declared she would stay for the night at her friend´s house. And she did, until 10 pm when she declared that she was actually going to sleep in her mummy´s car, so please give her a call and let her know about the new pick up arrangement. Coline does not get upset or scared in such situations. She announces her decisions softly and firmly and generally gets the message accross that indeed, what she says is how things are going to happen, and it did, I picked her up.

When she asked to repeat the experiment the next day I was not up for it, and instead suggested that she spent the next five days showing me (and herself) that she could fall asleep without me. We cut out a colored paper star every morning following her successfully falling asleep by herself, she proudly stuck it up on the wall by her bed and on the next Friday she went back to her friend´s, spent the night and the next morning, proud and happy to have such a vibrant friendship of her own.

...

I switched my computer on tonight with the intention of sharing light bits of our days but instead I compusilvely read through the internet, searching through words and images of familiar lands and faces for the disappeared, as some have been searching for lives under a thick layer of mud, for the children, the grandmother, the husband, the pets, for a decent explanation why there was no alarm, no bus, no truck to carry them away from the deadly wave of mud swallowing down a whole town, a valley and fearing to discover how many lives our luxurous and absurd lifestyles have cost so far.