Well. Don’t *you* have your own dashboard? What color is your dashboard? The artist? Just a few days over four years old. Inspiration? Well, Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows of course. What were you thinking?

This is the kind of thing that you find when you are slodging along slowly dredging out the Landfill Dungeon, humming a little tune to yourself just to keep yourself sane. It is evidence that there is a body of work from this young artist that actually exists on paper! Make no mistake. She did not limit her media to the back side of recycled vee-hickle emissions test processing printouts from the EPA. Her first mousies still reside on my sewing machine case, despite The Commander’s well-intentioned attempts to clean them off. I remember stopping that esteemed woman’s efforts with, “No, Mom! Don’t clean those off!” A few feet behind me, on the other side of the Ugliest Kitchen On Earth, a 2-1/2-year-old once wrote her name – “Mouse”. Yes, it is still there a little less than 20 years later. For a few years back in the day, I went crazy with making rules, “don’t draw with glitter glue on your bedframe, don’t use marker on the walls. Or floors. Or furniture.” Sigh. I can clearly remember saying, over and over again, “ONLY ON PAPER!”

One of my favorite memories is a beautiful summer day when we were scheduled to attend an all-day company picnic. I got the beach urchins all dressed up in their cute little summer dresses and the 2-year-old mousie decided to completely cover her arms and legs with marker “tattoos” while I was messing around with the deviled eggs or whatever. Okay… Clothing off and into the tub. I got the little mouse completely cleaned up and re-dressed and wouldn’t you know it, within about five minutes, she had markered herself up again. But. “It’s okay, mama, it’s all dried out now.” Say what? Sigh. I decided that it *was* okay and off we went.

Life with a “spirited” child (or whatever it’s called) can be a challenge but somehow, the little mouse will graduate from college in a few months (shhh) and she grew up to be herself, a wonderful and very talented person, despite whatever her baggy old moom tried to jam into her head. And she doesn’t even draw on herself any more. I don’t think. Do you, Mouse? I love you, Mouse!

Raising children is the hardest job on earth. And it is the most important.

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