“Look mummy, the trees are dancing,” cries Tadpole. Her curls, which I painstakingly combed only moments earlier, are blowing in all directions. Sometimes I wonder why I bother trying to make her look presentable. Her hair is always unruly; her sleeves inevitably covered with felt tip pen, or worse, if there are no tissues to hand.
“Yes, it’s very windy, isn’t it,” I reply, prosaically, wishing I had something with which to tie my own hair back. It whips across my face, gets tangled in my glasses.
“The wind is like music, it makes everything dance!”
To illustrate her point, Tadpole waves her arms, as though they were branches.
I smile to myself, thinking that if she can manage to conjure up poetic little similes every day, I’ll be able to sprinkle them liberally across my blog, and take all the credit.
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What a sweet-heart your daughter is. One day will you let her know that she featured here and put smiles on the faces of thousands and thousands of people across the globe?
Comment by northerncreative — May 19, 2006 @ 12:16 pm
Take credit, take credit!! Only such a daughter-poet and a mother-blogger can instill life in this manner :-).
Enjoy your windy week end!
Comment by Tom — May 19, 2006 @ 12:28 pm
Three generations of poets.
Comment by fjl — May 19, 2006 @ 12:28 pm
You will be so happy to have the blog to recall these precious little words of poetic wisdom… I’m sure my boys (8 and 10 now) must have said some prime things way back when… but sadly I don’t recall them… I wrote poetry when I was little, 5, 6, 7, and my mother kept every single poem, homemade card, etc. — and recently gave them back to me. It made for a good laugh , and sometimes a tear, for my boys and me.
Comment by magillicuddy — May 19, 2006 @ 12:37 pm
Another adorable Tadpole-ism. She is truly priceless and has indeed brought a smile to my face :)
Comment by Kasey — May 19, 2006 @ 12:41 pm
Little ones are often the best source of inspiration for blogs. It’s fantastic to share their moments of joy with a larger audience, and it helps the rest of us remember the wonder of everything before we reached the stage of worrying about things like tidiness.
Comment by BlondebutBright — May 19, 2006 @ 1:01 pm
I only met her once but I have to say I don’t really understand why you try to keep her hair from looking messy. It’s very very cute that way, not to mention branché. But, more of this Tadpole baby talk and I’ll need a pancreas transplant.
Comment by nardac — May 19, 2006 @ 1:10 pm
Oh that’s beautiful! Big grin on my face!
Side note to ‘magillicuddy’ – whenever I see your name on here, my eyes seem to automatically jumble the letters and I just read ‘Magic Cuddly.’ That always puts a big ol’ smile on my face too!
Comment by redlady — May 19, 2006 @ 1:20 pm
Trop beau. Aujourd’hui il ne fait pas beau en Angleterre mais, grace a Tadpole, quand je regarde par la fenetre je ne vois plus la pluie, je m’apercois plutot des arbres qui dansent – et je souris interieurement.
Comment by Aurore — May 19, 2006 @ 1:32 pm
Nardac – don’t try and pin your health problems on me, they are doubtless a result of your party-girl lifestyle.
Combing: because it gets really, really knotty. And because the nanny likes to keep up appearances. Not I.
Comment by petite — May 19, 2006 @ 1:39 pm
Superb, my hair goes all over the place, goes wherever it wants despite anything I might do to it, on a regular basis. Now I can just tell people that it’s dancing to the music of life: far better than simply admitting that I have no control.
Comment by Miss Nomer — May 19, 2006 @ 1:46 pm
Wow that’s really beautiful. Thank you for brightening my morning. Keep sharing…
Comment by Dina — May 19, 2006 @ 1:56 pm
What a breath of fresh air (or as the French would say, a bowl)!
Comment by Lost in France — May 19, 2006 @ 2:04 pm
Kids are funny. My niece once told me that I should marry her mom (my sister) so that I could live there and play with her more. Ummmm, I don’t see that happening.
Comment by homeimprovementninja — May 19, 2006 @ 2:23 pm
baby talks like this keep me rooting for my own little one someday. no matter how much others try to say a baby is what–18, 20 years responsibility. ;-)
Comment by swann — May 19, 2006 @ 2:48 pm
Speaking of hair…I’ve had one of those days where I washed my hair and managed to forget to use any shampoo.. So I’m sure that tadpoles looks simply delish in comparison!
Comment by Cara — May 19, 2006 @ 4:15 pm
Only just realised that Magillicuddy is not Magicilly Cuddly…you were not alone, Red Lady!
Love the way little ones say the truth in ways we just can’t; reminds me of my eldest boy saying, when it had just started to rain, ‘maman, I got sky kisses on my face’! That’s stayed, that one!
Smiles to everyone ;)
Comment by Lucy-Jane — May 19, 2006 @ 4:30 pm
johnson & johnson’s no more tangles… it comes in a bright spray bottle… my mum used it on my tangly hair as a child, and i still buy it today, its especially useful on a windy day!
Comment by jacqui — May 19, 2006 @ 5:10 pm
You can buy it as a shampoo too, or at least you could, I seem to remember the bottle was bright yellow. I still generally refused to have my hair brushed though (still do), much to my grandmothers disgust!
Comment by Ellie — May 19, 2006 @ 6:11 pm
Yes, keep putting more Tadpole stories down. They are always good for a smile.
Comment by joeinvegas — May 19, 2006 @ 9:21 pm
Je crois que Tadpole est une petite artiste avec mots!
As for her hair,choose your battles,Petite –
curly hair is always unruly. Je suis certain qu’elle le prefere comme ca; c’est naturale,non?
Depuis tout,elle est un enfant,avec le couer d’une enfant,wild,joyous, free and delightfully “un-appearance conscious”…boy, what I wouldn’t give for THAT most days!
Comment by Belle — May 19, 2006 @ 10:38 pm
For Lucy Jane and redlady… my nickname comes from… Lucille Ball … that was her character’s maiden name on the “I Love Lucy” show, if you remember/know THAT one… NOW guess how old I am, cough cough…
Comment by magillicuddy — May 19, 2006 @ 10:42 pm
magillicuddy: I’m in high school and watched “I Love Lucy,” so you can pull off any age you please.
Yay! petite is back for real! That week or so you were gone streched horribly long; I like hearing about your adventures in Paris, be they of love or Tadpole in nature. Just one month and I’ll be back there…
Comment by Alessandra — May 20, 2006 @ 3:43 am
Just delurking to say, that was just beautiful :)
Comment by Sophie — May 20, 2006 @ 5:53 am
Kids give us such inspiration.
I see your spam message, well the link I have isn’t mine, it is one I am getting going for my mother in-law..so I guess I can’t be spammin’.
Spam is no fun. Word verification stopped it on mine.
Keep Bloggin’
Comment by Randy — May 20, 2006 @ 5:59 am
Does Tadpole question everything quite seriously, quite pensively at times? I identify with being a single mum in France and the poetic instinct and the curls- (Petite knows the story. I lived with my three year old out in France, down in Aix). I catch a glimpse of that pensive questioning side in Tadpole, also, in the picture here.
Comment by fjl — May 20, 2006 @ 10:51 am
* sorry he was four when we went to Aix.
Comment by fjl — May 20, 2006 @ 10:52 am
Ciao Petite. (Ciao all.)
That post presents a lovely image. Very cool. “The wind makes everyting dance.” There’s a poem just waiting to be born from that line.
Comment by Scott Free — May 20, 2006 @ 11:11 am
hello. weirdly enough i dreamt that you were pregnant last night. um- huh? i’ve never even met you! tres bizarre. anyway, i hope its not a premonition and that when i do meet u with mimi we can all indulge in too much wine!
Comment by piu piu — May 20, 2006 @ 8:43 pm
A delightful story, and perhaps an indication of budding poetic talent (in the genes?), but also an illustration of the old maxim about nothing new under the sun. Wordsworth evoked the idea a long time ago –
“Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
and
“Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”
etc., etc., in his poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, which many of you must have learnt at school(?).
Comment by chester — May 21, 2006 @ 4:17 pm
If it was a result of my lifestyle, I’d need a brain and liver transplant… not pancreas.
Comment by nardac — May 22, 2006 @ 12:07 am
What fantastic and continuously fascinating reading. Only ‘found’ you a short while ago, Petite, but am, like everybody else, totally hooked on your brilliant poetic talent… It pays to read magazine articles sometimes!
As a natural curlyhead I know a tale or two; my son called me often Parsleyhead or Electric Mami – quite electrifying!
Love
PS: Would love to comment in French but that’s even ‘worser’ than my English.
Ouuuch, I don’t like to click into your eye – must I?
Comment by Kiki-de-la-Suisse — May 22, 2006 @ 6:10 pm
I would love to have kids of my own one day; it’s amazing to see things from their eyes!
Comment by Elana — May 25, 2006 @ 8:42 am