When my daughter was about four years old I told her that we needed to clean the house because her best friend was coming over. “We need to make the house really pretty for Alexa.”
Alexa’s mom and I had been friends since we were pregnant with our girls. Alexa had been my daughter’s friend since birth.
My friend was a self-professed obsessive compulsive clean freak and I’m not lying. Example: One time we went to visit Alexa and her mother at their house. I had to “powder my nose.” The bathroom was fresh and clean decorated with butterflies in shades of purple and green. I washed my hands and dried them on a new purple towel with beautiful butterflies embroidered along the edges. I can’t remember why, but a few minutes later I walked back in to the bathroom and noticed that the towel was now a mossy green! I was puzzled. She admitted that she had replaced the hand towel because it had been used! ONCE!
You understand how absorbed I was in straightening up my house knowing that my clean-freak friend was coming by to pay me a visit. My daughter, however, was no where to be seen and she was not being much of a help. Four year olds are capable of cleaning up their own toys.
She had disappeared into her room for quite awhile. When she came back into the living room her hands were full of little pieces of paper; these shapes that she had cut out of construction paper. She began to place these pieces of paper around the house.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“I’m making the house pretty for Alexa!”
“What are those?”
“They are diamonds.” She said, proudly.
The little pieces of paper were diamond shape. She had been in her room drawing diamonds on construction paper with a silver crayon and then cutting them out with scissors. To my daughter, making the house pretty meant placing diamonds all over the floor and furniture.
I don’t think Alexa’s mom would have been impressed, but I was. My daughter had created diamonds for her best friend. I was running around trying to impress my friend in another way.
I need to stop and see the diamonds!
