Yesterday morning I was trying to talk with the customer service department for one of our appliances. Phone to my ear, on hold, I wandered around the kitchen while the girls sat at the table eating breakfast.
Suddenly Michaela, my three year old, yelled to me across the kitchen:
“Quick, turn around…!”
I looked at her, then spun my eyes around the room to see what was the crisis, expecting to see perhaps smoke rising from the stove, water spilling across the floor, something on fire, something falling, something my mother eyes had missed. Seeing nothing I looked then back at her.
She yelled again, eyes wide, pointing to the island countertop:
“Quick turn around, the bulbs are growing!”
A few weeks ago the girls and I had planted some paperwhites with a little soil in a ceramic dish. Five bulbs were all that fit in the crimson rectangle, like the number in our family. Soon white roots sprouted into the dirt and the green stems are now growing high. The paperwhites sit on the island counterop, the green and crimson contrast against the black, gray and stainless steel of our kitchen.
“Quick turn around, the bulbs are growing!” Michaela had said.
She continued, “They’ve got big things like tongues.”
In her three-year-old way, she tried to describe the shape of the shoots. To her it was as if they could be seen growing, with rapid velocity, like in a movie where time is a toy, fast-forwarded. She was excited, noticing them as if for the first time, and like all excited children, wanting everyone else to share the joy too. To me it was a pot with dirt and bulbs, but to her it was an amazing sight: “growing!”
Indeed the bulbs were growing. And amazing. But they were not alone.
I said to myself, hanging up the phone:
Quick, turn around, the girls are growing!
1 response so far ↓
1 Katherine // Dec 10, 2003 at 10:57 pm
Just what I emailed to a friend today – sorry I can’t talk much on the phone with you during the day – I’m too busy enjoying my kids’ growth. I’ll be able to chat in the mornings in about 15 years. It’s an incredible change from 9 years ago when I thought I couldn’t wait until it was time for our firstborn to “go off to school.” And lo and behold, the very first year they’d both be away from 8:30am until 3pm, I decided to keep them home to learn here! God has very amusing ways!!!