Because Elephants have wrinkles...

Tonight Grace stood and watched me as I covered my face in a thick night moisturiser...

'Mummy, are you putting cream on because your face is sore?'
'No my face is fine. I'm just putting on cream to stop me from getting any wrinkles'.
Screwing her face up she asked 'But what happens if you put wrinke cream on your face when you don't have any wrinkles?'
Hearing this question made my heart skip a quick beat. Was this a compliment? from Grace??? Feeling quite pleased with how sweet Grace can be, I thought I'd fish for another compliment or two... 'Nothing happens. You just keep your skin happy. Why? Don't I have any wrinkles?'
This would have been the ideal point for her to say no.  But instead I copped the very cruel 'Yes. You do. There is lots of them!'...
She then began a very exhaustive list of how much my face wrinkles up when I laugh, smile, look cross, yawn, talk, brush my teeth, breathe.

She then started to sing. A very beautiful but cruel rendition of 'Elephants have wrinkles, wrinkles, wrinkles, Elephants have wrinkles, wrinkles everywhere!'

Maybe she could be my Aunt Jean..

Things for our family have been pretty hectic lately hence the lack of any posts in the last month or so but here is a lovely moment that Grace and I shared last month.  Before the end of day light savings and whilst it was still reasonably light at 5:30pm: 

Because things were so busy Grace and I were having to snatch whatever moments we could just to spend a little mummy-daughter time together. One evening, Neil dropped Grace off at my work so that we could share the walk home together. Our walk started off with her chirping about her day with her Nana and Owen and then it somehow carried off into a moving performance of a bear hunt. At some point between swishing and swashing through the tall, tall grass and finding the bear in a pretend dark cave Grace stopped the game, turned to me and whispered 'Mummy, please don't be sad anymore'. I was taken aback. 

This year my parents separated. And in the past few months I’ve become painfully aware that the familiarity of 'Home' back in Melbourne no longer exists and I had been feeling down about it. You don’t realise just how busy and short life is until you blink one day and realise three years has passed. And the recent death of a very dear great Aunt back in September had made me pretty miserable but I thought I’d done a pretty good job of hiding those feelings from Grace. It turns out intuitively, my little girl knows me better than anybody else. So much so that not even a make believe game couldn’t disguise how I had really been feeling. 

 She continued on ‘You know mummy if it would make you feel better, I could be your great Aunt. But not today because I’m wearing jeans and she probably liked wearing skirts…'