12. Tillie Tuesday Feb. 23, 2021

Tillie, with a slight lead in a race to her bedroom:

“You’re on the tip of our tails!”

Tillie, responding to my frustration with the dogs:

“You have to know that’s just what puppies do. It can’t go away from them. It’s part of them. It’s how God made them.”

Tillie, adjusting the rules of almost every game, or changing the course of every one of our nighttime “adventure stories”, employs the following phrases when necessary:

Let’s pretend...

Did I mention...

One problem...

About that...

Actually...

An example of this. Tillie likes to play hide-n-seek in the car. That’s right. In the car. While we are driving. While she is buckled into her car seat. Impossible, you say? Not with her. After we count to “one” because, you know... We announce the old “ready or not” and act out looking for her. Invariably, she is hiding behind her pillow in her car seat since there is no other place she could be. When we finally “find” her Tillie will use one of these phrases:

“Let’s pretend that I’m invisible”, for instance. And that’s how Tillie wins. Always.

Tillie, first words to me one morning:

“Do you know who Beethoven is?”

(Thank You quality education at a public school!)

Tillie, the food critic:

After I made congee (porridge) for breakfast for about the hundredth time,

Tillie deadpans, “Well, this is a new recipe.”

And, finally, I attempted to paint a “Tillie style”rainbow this week. Tillie is a bit of an expert on rainbows. She sees colors in the spectrum that aren’t often mentioned as classic rainbow colors. Here’s her assessment of my painting:

“That’s not a rainbow. That’s a brainbow. You need to start over. This is turning into a disasterpiece.”