During a recent conversation, as I was applying neosporin to what seemed like Julia’s entire body:

“Boy, Julia, you’re covered in bug bites.”

“What kind of bug made the bites, Daddy?”

“Probably mosquitoes. They looooove sweet little girls. They can’t get enough of sweet little girls to chew on.”

Pregnant pause.

“Boy, I’m in big trouble.”

(Picture from Julia’s recent preschool graduation. Kindergarten this fall. Too fast.)

“‘Similar analysis strategies are applied for the peptide mapping of glycoproteins’,” I read aloud to stymie my daughter. I should note that it may become apparent in the near future why I’m reading about glycoproteins, but humor me for a while. “What in the world are glycoproteins? I have no idea.”

“My neither,” she replied. “I think it’s like a dishwasher.”

I tried to fit in a little game of NHL08 this morning before work, but Julia was having none of it. She popped in and wanted to watch but watching soon became…

“Daddy, can you teach me how to play, please?”

I am not, contrary to common opinion, a heartless bastard and this certainly had its intended effect. So I loaded up a shootout, showed her that the left thumbstick made the little guy skate around and that if she wanted to shoot the puck she should push the right thumbstick up.

Away we go. She is quite entertained simply skating around for a while, occasionally sending poor Eric Staal repeatedly into the boards, then crosses the goal line and the whistle blows.

“You can’t cross the little line, sweetie.”

“Oh.”

Next skater comes and she skates around some more and crosses the goal line. Tweet.

“Don’t forget, you can’t cross the line.”

Next skater comes and she skates and pushes the right thumbstick forward and shoots, all by herself! This gets her excited but soon enough Daniel Alfredsson ends our run and the game ends. I set up a rematch and she skates in as Eric Staal again, wrists it from the slot and deflects one off the pads and scores!

“Yay Julia!” I’m pretty sure I scared her by yelling so loudly. “You scored!” She raises the controller over her head and bounces up and down in celebration.

Spezza skates in, toe drags and puts a nice one past Ward. Crap. I figured she might actually win it. Matt Cullen (allpraisehisname) skates in next and Julia skates past the goal line again. Ah well. Heatley takes his turn and boofs it so it’s Cory Stillman up next.

Julia skates in, wrists one which deflects off the glove and through Gerber’s legs for a goal! Winner, Julia! Her second NHL08 shootout ever and she wins it. At 4 and a half years old.

Almost brings a tear to my eye.

I often try to perceive the world as Julia must, just so I can try to appreciate her frame of reference. She has to make every discovery herself. For all she knew, until she figured out otherwise, when we put her down at night we stood outside her door expectantly until morning. She is still under the impression that the sun sleeps at night. I could explain that the sun is a massive ball of fiery elements and that we here on our own rock ball spin around it while our rock ball spins which would necessitate a diversion into gravity and centripetal and centrifugal forces otherwise she might never sleep again for fear that she’d fly off our spinning rock into the dark aether. No, much easier for Mr. Sun to go have a slumber.

Similarly, my daughter has no idea what I do every day when I “go to work”. Indeed, the only tangible thing she relates to work-wise is working in the yard. This has been the case since she first started speaking, when frogs were ling-a-nings and every other animate object was a ga-ga, and when lawnmowers were no-nos. So, when Papa went to work I was “going to work with no-nos”. As a simplifying classification this worked dandy since it gets complex saying “Papa sits in front of a computer and types all kinds of strange letters in this language called C or C++ which gets converted via a process called compiling into executable files that actually execute on cell phones.” Naw, Papa is “going to work with no-nos.” All day long.

Recently Julia had occasion to visit me at work while Mama went for a haircut. I set her up at an empty desk in our office and she sat and cut some paper for a while — she has recently mastered the use of scissors and aches to display her considerable snipping talents whenever possible — and then started examining her environs carefully. Finally she gets up the nerve.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Juju?”

“Where is your no-no?”

ColdForged’s $1 Question of the Day

This one’s a bit tricky. First one with a winning answer in the comments gets the buck in their Paypal account.

Find one search term at Google where the #1 result points to one of my posts. No, you can’t look for ColdForged or my real name for those that know it.

We had snow recently for a brief period of time. Time enough to craft some snowmen and make some friends.

“And we’ll be best friends forever.”

Or, at least until the rain melts it in about 5 hours.