Cupcakes and (de)composition

My niece came to my house to play with me today. You can call me a babysitter if you want, but I really dig the kid. She popped out of her momma three months early, weighing a whopping two-point-what's-the-use-of-counting-the-ounces-when-she's-this-small pounds.

She looked like a baby gerbil when she was born. Her skin looked raw and unfinished in that 'put it back, it's not done baking' kind of way. And she lived in a box with special lights and lots of tubes and soft touching and diapers made of gauze pads because that's how small she needed a diaper to be. I swiped one of her pre-pre-preemie diapers from the hospital during one of my visits there. After I left I put the diaper on a rubber chicken I had hanging on the credenza back at work so I could remember just how incredibly small and frail and alive she was. It was a good way for me to remember to keep the joy and sadness and fear and all those Big Human Emotions all together near one another in quite a physical way. If I ran into trouble with one I could always call on one of the others toot-suite. Yes?

So she's going to be five soon, this one. This kid who has the energy of 29 horses and the smile of several constellations' worth of twinkling stars. We have a certain way of doing things at my house. She wants to do six different art/coloring projects while watching Kid TV while playing a board game while building a Lego tower with her toes. Audrey has a tendency to be very much like her aunt in this regard and the primary rule of business came quickly for us both:

First things first, one thing at a time.

Today's first thing, we decided, was to be the cupcake making. We made a mid-cupcake-making trip to the grocery store when we accidentally ran out of vanilla. And because Audrey 'would really really love a little drink of the grape juice like that little girl on tv is drinking, but I prefer the purple to the see-through kind'. What can I say? I'm a sucker for her batted eyelashes and she needs nutritional juice products.

Cupcake making was good fun for both of us. She learned to crack eggs by herself today. I'd measure the other ingredients and she'd pour them into the bowl. I held the hand mixer (she can't stand loud noises) and she licked the beaters when the mixing was done. And when it came to decorating time, she had roughly 13 different shakers of varying sizes and shapes containing sugars and sprinkles and nonpareils and themed crunchies (four of the shakers had come together as a 4-pack... the Scooby-Doo theme, donchaknow: Scooby snacks, dog bones, dog tags and some other completely unidentifiable sugary shape in neon colors. That'smygirl though, going for the sparkly shiny neon bright whatever it might be.

We don't usually put frosting on our cupcakes unless it's a special special occasion, so I suggested that she put the sprinkles right on top of the batter and we'd bake 'em in. She took me seriously, opening every lid so she could get to aaaaaalllll the shakers without having to get mad if her fingers got slippery and she couldn't open one of them (yes, she said that was one of her big concerns). She used up several containers' worth of sprinkles and sugars on those 12 cupcakes and she had a ball.

We put the decorated cupcake batter into the oven, set the oven timer, and attended to the next two tandem items on our busy list: funeral and aquarium cleaning. I hadn't noticed that at some point during this past weekend one of my fish died. The four year old with hawk vision noticed immediately when she asked to help me feed them. I pulled out the net, tried my best to give her honest (honest, not scary and revolting) answers to the questions she asked about dead stuff. I showed her the tail section only when she asked to see the dead fish I had essentially scraped off the bottom of the filter, in pieces. I suggested that it might make her feel even sadder if she saw the whole dead fish (without adding the 'in 15 rotting pieces' part) so how about we just look one last time at the tail and I'll take it outside.

'How come you take dead fish outside?', she wanted to know. I silently asked myself whether answering 'well darling, anything larger than a rabbit turd will clog the toilets so out he goes!' would affect her adversely for the rest of her life. Yeah, probably.
Instead of insisting on absolute accuracy in my reporting, I gave her a short 'circle of life' lesson, at the end of which she insisted excitedly that she could help me dig a hole in which to bury the fish.

Cool. I'd appreciate the gravesite company.

A few minutes later the fish was buried. She added the sweet touch of childhood to our brief ceremony when she asked me to fill her watering can with some of the old water from the fish tank. I brought out a small plastic container of water which she poured over the buried fish.

When I asked her why she had chosen that particular spot on which to dump her water she confidently replied that she was pretty sure that giving some of that water to the dead fish 'it might get back alive'.

The post-funeral visitation took place in the living room. While nibbling cupcakes and sipping juice Aud decided that the remaining two fish left in the tank would both be named Oinky. We visited the fish store later, and she named one of the two platys 'Sleeping Beauty' and the other platy, Oinky. As are the two new tetras and the suckerfish.

So that's Oinky, Oinky, Oinky, Oinky, Oinky, Oinky and Sleeping Beauty. Alrighty, I think the system is simple enough for even me to remember.

The car ride out to her house after the post-cupcakes post-funeral post-snack post-fish tank cleaning was a deluxe guessing game. Here's how that game is played:

• think of an animal.
• give some semi-telling clues about what that animal looks like/says/eats/lives
• pretend you are that animal. Demonstrate the look/sound/etc.
• have the other person guess what you might be.
• it's extra funny if your aunt guesses a completely wrong animal. If you say you have a pouch on your tummy, she might say something like 'what? that pouch isn't to hold your groceries in?'
• if there are two animals you are especially fond of, keep using those two animals over and over and over and over. Like, say... oh, a puffer fish and a giraffe. Your aunt will never be able to figure out the 'I have a long neck' clue you give her, not even if you use that animal nine times in a row.
  

I hope we have more play dates soon. Its appearing as though Thanksgiving will be a kidtastic time. My two nephews (brothers, aged 6 mos. and 2.5 years) will be coming with their momma and daddy to the family gathering. I've already warned J. that he'd best stretch his back in preparation for the 'MYYYYYY turn to climb on cousin!' game. That's another especially fun one.

These little people, they grow and leave and do what all young who survive nest living are meant to do. Seems to me that the flash of those tender little childhood moments are just like the Scoobysnack sprinkles that Aud so generously covered the tops of her cupcakes with ... sweet, crunchy, and I can't possibly seem to get enough of them to fit on the top.