Dorothy's class was taking a look at old technology. I emailed her teacher and offered to loan her our rotary phone. Dorothy read over my shoulder and added, "You should have told her that it was a phone with the little circles on it."
Dorothy couldn't find a passage I told her was in parenthesis. I pointed to it on the paper. "Oh," she said, "I was looking for air quotes."
I spilled hot water and burned my hand. After some minutes, Dorothy asked me, "Do you want to face your fears, and pour some more hot water for me?"
We were putting on our shoes to join my neighbor and her daughter for a walk. Dorothy said excitedly, "I need to think of a conversation starter!"
Dorothy and her friend played board games throughout the morning. Later, she said sweetly, "It's fun to play games with friends. It's more fun than playing with adults."
UPDATE 9/6: The magazine updated the website with the correct words. Order is restored.
Dorothy submitted a poem about hummingbirds to Zoobooks magazine. Months later, I was thrilled to see it published in the online gallery, and called her over to the computer.
She burst into tears.
The magazine editors changed the words of her poem. (I think they had trouble reading her handwriting.)
Dorothy and I have been watching The Baby-Sitters Club series on Netflix.
In one episode, Kristy's mom gets remarried, and the scene shows a shortened ceremony. "I notice that they skipped most of the wedding so that they wouldn't actually have to get married," Dorothy noted.
In another episode, Claudia says something heart-tuggingly sweet about friendship to Mary Anne, a character who lost her mom to illness when she was a toddler. "You're gonna make me cry," Mary Anne says to her friend. "I don't understand how she doesn't cry all the time, because her mom is dead," Dorothy said.
"Mama," Dorothy asked, "do you think that babies' cheeks are so big because they don't have any teeth, and when they close their mouths, there are no teeth to stop their mouths from closing, and their cheeks keep puffing out bigger?"
I told Dorothy that I got a wasp bite, and she asked, "How is that different from a wasp sting?"
Dorothy has been wearing some new, unpilled pajamas. "Soon these will have those soft, warm little balls on them," she said with anticipation.
We were preparing for an evening pool birthday party when a thunderstorm popped up. The mom sent a text that the party would be rescheduled, and Dorothy was upset that she would not be able to make the rain date. "But it's a glow party!" she sobbed. "I don't even know what that means, but I wanted to find out!"
Dorothy and Willa disappeared to her bedroom and played dolls for hours. Dorothy eventually emerged, arms overflowing with baby dolls, and announced, "We're fast-forwarding 7 years, so I need to trade these for bigger dolls."
A sweet kid at school named Owen has had a crush on Dorothy for years. His name was on her third grade class list, and she grumbled, "If I get another heart on my desk..."
Dorothy's teacher gave her a fun all-about-me sheet, and my very literal daughter had trouble filling it out. After agonizing for two days, she said she had only one question left. "What is the question?" I asked. She answered, "It says, Which celebrity would you want to have in your class at school?" She continued, "The problem is, I don't know any third grade celebrities."
