Yesterday my daughter found "a rock".  Not just some plain old grey rock or piece of cement chipped out of someone's driveway, this rock is actually a glass pebble meant to decorate the interior of a vase full of flowers, an aquarium floor, or to be used in a mosaic project.  We've dozens of these "rocks" floating around the house right now, all purchased for a project of my own that never came to fruition.  Our rocks, however, range in color from a green so pale it's clear to a deep Coke-bottle green.  Our rocks, piled up in a toy shopping basket, are tossed in with the pennies and nickels from a piggy-bank raid for "shopping money" a few weeks back.  None of these rocks mean much.  None of these rocks have been caught up in her little paddy of a hand all afternoon...or ever before.

This rock, this treasure found on the sidewalk while running through the sprinkler with several neighbor girls...THIS rock is different.  This rock, desperately clutched in my daughter's left hand today, is a lovely shade of blue.  A surprising azure that for whatever reason attracts her the way the hot patio attracts my black dog on sunny days.  She has no real reason to be there, clinging to this piece of rounded glass, but for whatever reason this rock matters.  It isn't that it was free, it isn't that it is blue, it isn't that it's made of glass.  For some reason, this rock offers her a comfort and that matters.

She came home from her father's house with a slight cold a few days ago...nothing that seemed too horrible.  A stuffy nose, a few cranky moments; nothing to write home about or to bother complaining about.  This will surely happen many more times over the next decade or so.  This is the time to say, "I'm sorry you're sick." This is the time to learn to let the little things go, to learn to pick my battles, and to remember that one of the cardinal rules of motherhood is that kids get sick.  Yep, we all know it, whether we like it or not.  They are going to get sick, and despite the urge to whine and complain about having to deal with it "all alone"...this is the time to tell myself to suck it up and let it go. 

Since she was doing "fine" this week it was a surprise that her spirits turned sour yesterday.  Time to unleash irritation about the heat (it's finally turning into summer here in western Washington...boy howdy!  We went from 65 to 80 in a day...BLEAH!), not feeling well and not getting her way.  Of all places, this time was the middle of a shopping trip at Home Depot.  Yep, we (she, then I) had a meltdown in the parking lot of the local Home Depot right between a rack of tomato starts and a stack of 3 gallon blueberry plants.  Now it just doesn't get any better than that, does it?  By the time we got home it was near 80 F and she was calm again...she got to run in the sprinkler for an hour or more while I washed my truck (MY TRUCK!) and another child had a meltdown before she did.  Soon after she was stretching herself out on a quilt in the middle of the driveway, asking for snacks and refusing to eat them...little did I know she was more than just tuckered out.

The "real" fever hit with a fury about 0300 this morning.  After a late morning (she tossed and turned and finally woke up about 1100 this morning) and a HUGE fight about getting medicine into her to break the fever, my best friend arrived with a different kind of fever reducer (admittedly the stuff I tried to get her to take tastes horrible, but what can I do about it?  Talk to the pharmaceutical cos!) and we finally coerced her into taking the new stuff.  (God bless the makers of Tylenol meltaways!)  A half hour later she was asleep in a living room chair, but had begun to sweat...which she had NOT been doing; scary in this heat.  After an hour and a half nap, she woke with eyes cleared of the feverish haze, a sweat-drenched forehead...and that rock sitting on the table beside her.  Miyuki had brought it in from the front porch, where she left it for safekeeping last night.

The moment she spotted it she moved it to the arm of the chair...and that's where it stayed today, when it wasn't gripped tightly in her little fist.  Left one, of course...she's left-handed and that's the place of power.  Amazing how many people told me when she was six months old, "Oh, they don't choose a hand for dominance until they are school-age".  She has been a leftie since she could grip a toy or binkie and to allow herself to be weakened by holding something in her stronger hand for any length is a feat in itself. 

Whatever this rock holds...whatever reason it draws her...who am I to argue?  She says she sees a light within it, which I could easily justify as being a reflection of whatever light is in the room.  But I can just as easily justify it as being the light reflected from a little girl who is feeling lousy, crabby and ill...and needs to be reminded that there's light within her as well.