Wednesday, September 28, 2016

My Shadow(s)

Yes, that’s not a typo. I have two daughters and so, most days, I have two shadows.

Though to be fair to Alyssa, now that she’ edging in on fourteen, she’s become less of a shadow and more of her own person. That and she’s usually too busy watching a Pentatonix video on her phone or tablet (or maintaining her TWO Pentatonix-fan accounts on Instagram) to follow me from room to room and floor to floor she used to and like her sister still does.

Olivia, though, is still very much in shadow-mode. From the moment I get home from work, she follows me, telling me about her day, regaling me with stories about her imaginary friends, which now include the members of Pentatonix because Alyssa has inundated our house with this group and Olivia adores her sister and so had embraced them as her very own loves.

Though because Olivia doesn’t like to use actual names for the members of Pentatonix, she calls them by her own, very creative names:
Avi Kaplan is known as Weird Dot Guy. This is because of the makeup he wore in one of their videos.
Kirsten Maldonado is The Girl Pentatonix
Scott Hoying is Blue Guy because he wears blue on one of their album covers.
Mitch Grassi is Green Guy because, yes, you guessed it he wears green on one of their album covers.
Kevin Olusola is either Yellow guy (see above for reason) or Beat Boxing Guy because, yes, he’s the beat boxer. Olivia imagines herself a beatboxer. It’s adorable when she tries.

There are moments, though, when having a constant shadow can get a little, shall we say, annoying. Those moments like, oh, I don’t know, when I have to use the bathroom.

Some days I’ll actually tell her, “I’m just going to pee. You don’t have to follow me.”

She usually laughs and said, “What? Don’t you want an audience?” And then she follows me to the bathroom.

I’ve tried locking the door but this ends up being more annoying than helpful because she stands outside the door, twisting the knob, knocking on the door, asking me why I locked it. It’s just easier to let my shadow in from the start.

I know this won’t last forever.

I know I’m lucky to have such…loving children.

I know all this.

But I do wish I could pee in private once in awhile.

2 comments:

Julie said...

Surely you get to pee in private while at the office. :0

Tommie said...

Ha! I do...most of the time. But just today, I went to the restroom, one of my co-workers was already in there. She was washing her hands and heading out the door.

I was in a stall, you know, PEEING, when she came back into the restroom and initiated a full-blown conversation with me. I was all, "Dude, I'm peeing here. Can this wait until I'm back in my office?"

Nope, conversation continued and was finished before I finished my own, personal, business.

And I thought Olivia was bad. At least I'm her MOM!