Pretty Baby

Siena's growing so fast that sometimes you can see a difference between dropping her off and picking her up at preschool. But evidently that's not fast enough for her. "Three going on Thirteen" is an old joke now, and like most old jokes it's no longer funny.

Siena's long since noticed Mommy's daily routine of applying makeup, and has always been intensely interested in this curious ritual. In Mommy's bathroom there's a stack of used makeup containers (I have no idea what the names for each kind of container is, so don't expect me to paint as vivid a picture as usual) which Siena uses to apply her pretend-makeup alongside Mommy. On a side note, we have two bathrooms and three people, so how do we handle this? Obviously, one bathroom is exclusively Mommy's, at least for showering purposes, while Daddy and Siena share the other. Or so I thought, until the day I told Siena to go wash her hands in my bathroom, where the step-stool resides, and she told me, "You don't have one."

Where were we? Oh yeah, makeup. So in the hectic minutes before going to church, say, you can catch Siena standing over her bookshelf in her room, pretending to brush something onto her cheeks or eyelids. Cute, fine, whatever, right? Not right. Because now it's starting to affect Daddy.

It's not that I'm creeped out about the kid growing up too soon; her arms aren't yet long enough to make potty-time a completely independent experience. It's that now I have to wait for Siena to finish her makeup, or sometimes help her apply it. Somewhere she got a tube of lip balm, a kiddie version of Chap Stik. Now she keeps it in the car all the time, and can't go to school without putting on her "lipstick," even if Daddy has to crawl around the back seat and find this terribly important cosmetic device.

It happened this morning, on the way to preschool. Now, the mornings are usually a race against time, because if you show up to school after 9:00 they literally lock the doors for the kids' all-important morning meeting, and you can't drop off your kid until 9:45. And I'm not looking to dump Siena off any earlier than I have to, so I've got it timed that I drop her off a few minutes before nine -- and then have a great excuse to cut out early, rather than spend a half-hour playing Legos in a long goodbye. But because we're cutting it close anyway, any complication ro delay could seriously mess up my morning. So when our well-oiled machine grinds to a halt so that Little Miss Sunshine can find her un-lipstick somewhere under the seats, Daddy gets just a little bit aggravated.

I know, just wait until she's a true teenager, Ha, Ha, Ha. At least then she can drive herself to school.