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Now, she can easily sleep until noon if I don’t wake her.
“I have something for you,” I say.
She’s suddenly wide awake. “What is it?”
From the floor, I pick up a packet and hand it to her. She opens it and unpacks art supplies on her bed.
“It’s not my birthday yet,” she says. “Is this an early present?” She narrows her eyes at me.
“No, you’ll still get your presents,” I laugh. “I just wanted to spend some time together, doing something different than we usually do. I’m sick of baking cookies.”
“Me too,” Kylie giggles. “But not sick of eating them,” she reminds me just in case I think we don’t do cookies anymore.
“Right,” I say with a grin. “Get dressed, and we’ll get arting.”
“That’s not even a word,” she laughs.
“Let’s make it one.”
Kylie hops out of bed and I leave her room so she can get dressed. I prepare two glasses of chocolate milk for us and put it on a tray with a bowl of oatmeal cookies I bought from the store. I set it all up in the spare room where we’ll do our art—the floorspace is big enough with the unused bed pushed up against the wall—and then we’re almost ready to get going.
When Kylie comes into the room and sees the tray, she stops dead in her tracks.
“Is that for us?”
“Who else would it be for?”
She hesitates. “I’m never allowed cookies for breakfast. What happened?”
I shrug. “I’m just in the mood for a treat.”
Kylie still looks suspicious. She takes one cookie and bites into it, watching me while she chews. When I smile at her, she smiles back. She’s decided it’s safe and not some kind of trick.
“Come on, what are we going to draw?” I ask and sit on the floor. I spread out the supplies I got—coloring pencils, finger paint, glitter glue, and large sheets of paper.
“I think we should draw a fairy garden,” Kylie says.
I chuckle at that. Of course, it will be fairies.
We dive in. After planning out the garden and where the fairies will be, Kylie draws their wings with glitter glue while I use finger paint to do the plants. I draw ferns and lilies and roses.
“We should add a pond,” Kylie says.
“With fireflies,” I agreed.
I paint little yellow spots for the fireflies, and Kylie adds their bodies with pencil before we use the different colors of blue to create the water.
“If you add this here,” I say, adding white and black paint, “it creates depth so it looks like the pond is much deeper than when we just paint a circle.”
“Wow,” Kylie breathes. “It makes me want to see the fish beneath the surface.”
I add one or two black shadows that look like they might be fish and Kylie is mesmerized.
“How did you do that?” she asks.
“What?”
“Paint like that. I can’t do that. I thought you said I got my creativity from you.”
