I wonder…

My mother is taking Naomi Rivka to see a kids' musical production of Cinderella on December 31st.  She bought the tickets in mid-November, and I thought she could maybe save it for a Chanukah surprise, but no, she told Naomi right away, and I found a flyer about the play and gave it to her (no pictures, but she loves flyers).

And now it’s been a few weeks and nobody has said anything.  Because it’s not NEW anymore, and it’s not TIME yet, so it’s just not on anybody’s mind.  It’s on the calendar, just nobody has mentioned it recently.

So I wonder what Naomi thinks.

I wonder if she has forgotten; I doubt it.

I wonder if she thinks we have forgotten; quite possible.

I wonder if she thinks we were lying, or made a mistake, and there really is no play.

Or maybe she thinks she misunderstood what we were telling her in the first place.  Because kids must misunderstand so, SO much in the first five years of life. 

These are huge  misunderstandings, too, like maybe you think someone has told you the stove is made of chocolate… and you reach out to taste some the next thing you know your hand is getting scalded and you’re being spanked and yelled at.  I mean, of course the stove isn’t made of chocolate, but they said it was.  Or at least… you thought so.  Ouch.

It’s like that “blah blah blah” parent / teacher voice from Charlie Brown cartoons.  That’s what all grownups must sound like, only with more and more actual words getting through and getting understood every couple of weeks.

So maybe she thought she’s misunderstood and we were telling her about a play she wasn’t going to go see, a production one of us saw as a child, maybe, or maybe something she will do when she gets older.

I want to wake her up and explain.

I want to tell her she really did understand right, and it’s just another two weeks to wait until her play.  It probably won’t even be that great a play, for all the weeks of lead-up, like the time my father took the big kids to see this huge production of the Magic Flute and he had to book the tickets something like a year in advance.  And made them all excited, and, well, they enjoyed themselves, but not a YEAR’s worth of enjoyment.

I want to hug her and tell her she will understand more and more as she gets older.

But we just got her back to sleep after a crisis with an unstuffed pocket diaper someone snuck onto her after naptime (who puts a diaper, especially an unstuffed pocket diaper, on an almost-5-year-old the minute she wakes up DRY from a nap, and then lets her run around in it all evening?!?!?).

(Ted, who didn’t do it, says, “She wanted to wear it.”  Okay, then!)