As most of you know, I'm a huge fan of fun and laughter. I think there's quite a scarcity of it in the world, so I do my best to add a dose here and there as I can. It's as much a good will effort as a form of entertainment.
Since it's a well-known statistic that children laugh roughly 400 times per day, while adults laugh only 15 or so, one of my favorite ways to seek out joy when I need a serious dose of it is to consult my daughter Malina, who has provided me with three and a half years of well-timed and thoughtfully-executed humor. So, on the day in question, I sought her out for a serious bout of silliness. All went well until IT happened. It's a tale of when good fun goes bad...and then goes good again.
Mal and I were hanging out having a bit of "girl time," chatting it up (as she calls it) and interspersing a few rowdy song and dance hits to liven things up a bit. She suggested a rousing version of "John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmidt," which I gladly accommodated. Round about the third or fourth verse, things started getting out of hand.
There were flailing limbs to contend with, dance moves that, had they not been performed by a toddler, I would say closely approximated the Lambada (the forbidden love dance), and some serious butchering of vocal nuance on both our parts. It was all too fun until an unfortuante tragedy struck. Ok fine. It wasn't really a tragedy. But it was unfortunate.
During a complicated but highly entertaining Vogue-pose (I give it a 9.9 for technical difficulty), Malina accidentally gashed my face with her tiny, razor-like fingernail. How their teeny-weeny little nails get that sharp I'll never know. Honestly, it felt like a CSI episode, where they show in minute detail the gory up-close aspects of how trauma affects the body.
I instinctively shrunk back and cradled my cheek in my hand and she immediately stopped her vaudeville routine long enough to give me her best "Home Alone" expression (picture McCauley Culkin with his hands on his cheeks, eyes like saucers, lips pursed into a tiny round "o."). She was shocked and, being a rather emotionally savvy pre-schooler (yes, it's possible), looked at me with compassion, and then with pain, knowing that she had been the one who caused my discomfort.
I gave it about 30 seconds to get over the shock of an unexpected playtime injury like this and assured her it would be just fine and that finishing our song was of great importance. Then, of course, I realized that the song never really ends...so how could we finish it? I figured we'd come up with a way to create the grand finale. The point was, the show must go on.
I decided the wound would heal (evidently not quickly, though, much to my dismay), but I'd never have another moment exactly like this one to good naturedly massacre a dearly-loved children's song with my daughter (though we do make many attempts together). So I'll have a scar. But I'll also have a great cocktail-party story for anyone who asks about it. And, I'll have the sheer pleasure of reflecting on a blessed few moments of uninhibited, unadulterated, laugh-unti-you-cry (or, in this case, cry-until-you-laugh) connection with my daughter. That's worth a wound or two, don't you think? It's a small price to pay for a big dose of good fun.
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