As I left daycare this afternoon with my three wild things -- Zoe, Finn and their cousin Braden -- Zoe scraped the knuckles of her right hand on the building's brick wall. While no adult would find this pleasant, for a five-year-old girl it signifies something akin to the pain of Armageddon combined with fingernail-pulling and topped with a dash of a hairbrush pulling through wet, tangled hair.
First came the Big Bad Wolf-like huffing and puffing which soon led to hyperventilated sobs. When this happens, I immediately shift into fight or flight mode. In any kind of physical pain situation, the kids would happily run from my side across three lanes of rush hour traffic to get to their mother. I've learned to accept this and usually look around to hand them off as soon as a scraped knee happens. Since Wendi was 2 miles away at home when Zoe got this particular war wound, I got ready to fight childhood fears with superior adult reasoning.
"Daddy!! Look, it's bleeding," she says as the tiniest bit of epidermis turned 2 shades darker than her top layer of skin.
"Zoe," I reply, "that doesn't look so bad. It's not really even bleeding. It's going to sting for a little bit but it will be alright soon."
"But Daddeee, it really hurts. Look," she says as she touches her right index finger to her left hand and shows me what looks like a perfectly dry finger tip. "Its already bleeding."
I can't fight 5-year-old imaginary boo-boo logic. Fearing a 15-minute howl-fest on the car ride home, I scrambled to come up with anything that will make her feel better. And then it hit me.
"Zoe, look at Daddy's hand. I scraped my hand in the same place as your boo-boo on the closet shelves the other day."
"So what...my hand still really hurts," she countered.
"That makes us boo-boo twins. See," I said as I held out my fist for her to inspect.
"Oh," she said as she touched her fresh scrape to my days-old-one. "That's cool, Daddy!"
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