Dear Reese,
We all stand over you and clap. You’re strapped in your car seat before we leave the cottage for the night, and you look at us and clap back. You haven’t quite figured out how to uncurl your fists when you do this but you’re clapping!
It sounds like you had a beautiful day with MorMor and Cappi. It is the warmest day in months and I envy you while I sit inside working. The swing is set up once again at the cottage and I get this video in our family chat:
You’re tired at bathtime tonight, so we skip washing your hair and do a just short installment of our developing story, “The Castle in the Pond”.
After you scared off the Giants and cleaned up their trash, you napped with your head on the duck’s feathers and woke in the late morning. After a breakfast of tasty pond weeds — magical so they taste great! — you visit the Great Bullfrog for the next task.
Croak! Croak! (you smile) The Great Bullfrog isn’t pleased when you admit to having help from the duck and the bats and vows to give you a task where no one will be able to help you. This task, she says, has had a reward for its successful completion for years but no pond dwellers have ever succeeded: to find her golden fly.
I will find it! you declare (and lift yourself out of the bathwater — you are doing this more and more, getting to your feet while holding yourself on the tub edge. It is going to end in tears one of these nights).
Your yellow duck companion has little information on where to look, but leads you to pond-jumper who searches for the golden fly every night “I’ll find it!” he says in a high, excited voice. “Each night I catch a firefly . . . one of them must be the golden fly she’s looking for! But they won’t let me in the castle anymore . . .”
So . . . not a firefly, you think. You ask the duck more about the Great Bullfrog, hoping to glean some insight into what this golden fly might be or where you could hope to look. The duck suggests talking to someone who’s been here as long as the Great Bullfrog for answers.
Who that might be, we’ll find out next bathtime.
I really cannot wait to teach you to play D&D, darling.
Love,
Mama