Nevergirl's

Alex has been writing a lot. You’d think, by the number of pads she goes through, that she’s writing letters to half the world population… or a quarter of all the bushmen in Africa. She pretends she’s writing stories when all she ever writes is the alphabet, over and over again.

Every now and then, she copies the words off my books, strings them together, and tells us she finally came up with a title for her book. Today, the story was Diwata Festival Undone. Yesterday, it was Globelines Lake Wogone Days. Who knows what she will be writing tomorrow? She makes hydrocephalic stick figures by the dozen and drawings of herself and her sister being chummy with cute little rats.

A scanner, that’s what I need, so I can document my daughter’s scribbling and drawing, upload the images, and someday, show her how she made use of paper and pencil while she was five years old. An inkblot test, that’s what Alex needs so we can figure out why she peppers her drawings with bow-wearing vermin.