Where Are Mine?

Putting Sophie to bed is something that fills me with equal parts enthusiasm and equal parts dread. I love reading to her. I do not like lying in bed with her. I am required to lie in her bed with her, all scrunched up in her shorter-than-normal bed while other adults, daddy included, get away with just a regular reading.

Worse still if I end up falling asleep scrunched up on that bed, right hand behind my head, curled up in a fetal position. Nothing sends me into a funk more than waking up blur and groggy after an evening nap that wasn't scheduled.

So there I was, all curled up and trying to get the small fry to quiet down and get to sleep already, and she's having none of it. She's tracing the lines of my face and pointing out my features: eyes, nose, eyebrows.

Then she gingerly touches her face in search of her eyebrows. Her hand misses them by a mile and ends up on her forehead. She paws her forehead in search of the elusive brows.

"Oh dear. I've got no eyebrows," exclaims the small fry.

It takes me a gargantuan effort not to guffaw.

"No, baby, of course you have eyebrows. Here, mommy will show you where they are. Give me your hand."

And I spend the next five minutes or so retracing her eyebrows with her hand just to reassure her that yes, she wasn't born bald. No, my Chinese gene wasn't so cruel as to render her without eyebrows, just flat-nosed.