The L Word

There are days where I have to think about what I'm going to write on here, and then there are days where this blog writes itself. Last week, Sonya helped give me the later.

The girls had just sat down to eat dinner, and I was running around doing my normal evening duties. They were chatting with each other and I was about to walk out the back door to go water the flowers. I started to put my shoes on and Sonya said to me,

"I have something to tell you, but I'm embarrassed of it." Well, THIS sounded interesting. I stopped turned around and said,

"You can tell me Sonya. What's going on?" I was trying to be nonchalant about it. I didn't want to seem too enthusiastic about finding out what she had to say, because this could make her not want to tell me at all.

"Well," she started, "this is really true." Then she paused and I encouraged her to go on. She sighed and said, "I'm in love with Eli, and I've been having dreams about him for the past week." She stopped, looked at me, and quickly said again, "It's really really true."

I stood there staring at her for a moment, chewing the inside of my cheeks to keep from bursting out into laughter. My five year old just told me she's IN LOVE. Not that she likes a boy or thinks he's cute, but IN LOVE. Where did she get that?? After I regained my composure I said,

"Really? Huh. Um, how or why are you in love with him?" This was all I could think to ask at this point.

She got a dreamy look on her face, sighed again, then said, "He's just so precious, he's so precious."

Precious?? I have NO idea where that word came from, but this made me want to laugh even harder. At this point I was smiling. There was no way around that. Maybe even chuckling a little. I was trying hard to squelch it though. The only way to do this was to ask more questions.

"What kind of dreams did you have about him?" I asked.

"I don't know...princess dreams," she replied.

"Like you were the princess and he was the prince?" I offered.

She shyly said, "Yeah." Then she got a worried look and said, "Don't tell anybody about this!"

Ooops. The Internet doesn't count right? Thank goodness she's to young to know this blog exists. Well, for now anyway. She can hate me later for it.

Then I asked, "Didn't you tell Lourdes and Gwen that you are in love with him?"

"Yeah, they know," she told me.

"What about Daddy?" I asked. "Don't you want to tell Daddy?"

She thought about this for a minute and said, "Okay... but I want YOU to tell him!"

"Sure," I agreed. Then there was one more question I thought to ask before I left her alone about her new found love,

"Does Eli like you?"

Without missing a beat and very confidently she answered, "Oh Yeah!" I guess it's good he likes her back, right? Well, at least according to her.

I've decided to volunteer in her class on Wednesday to see what this kid is like and find out what his intentions are with my daughter. I just hope he's the nice boy in class and not the one who runs around like crazy and sniffs glue. It's bad enough that she's five and "in love" to begin with, but I'm certainly not ready for her to be in love with a bad boy.

As my Dad always used to say- I think it's time to get out the overalls and shotgun.