Happy Letters

This happened a couple of months ago, but I just got around to scanning the images so I could write about it. My daughter A. was just doodling one afternoon, drawing pictures of flowers and suns, writing her name and random letters and numbers... generally having fun.

Later, when I looked at the notepad she had been using, I saw that she had drawn or written a few things on a page, and then flipped it and started fresh, over and over. Here's what it looked like on page 2 or 3, and it was the same stuff by page 15 or 20...

I started to get a little annoyed, because we never seem to have enough paper in the house. It's not like the stuff is expensive, but it is annoying to continually be running out. I continued to flip through the random drawings and letters, getting more and more annoyed (for no good reason, but parents of little ones will likely sympathize with my annoyance) and was just about to say something to her about it, when I saw that she had started working on the letters in her brother's name. Then I came to this page, and smiled:

A. loves to put smiley faces in things, but there's something special about the R with a smiley face and hat. I think it's my favorite drawing of anything ever, in the history of everything. Just the thought of her sitting there in the dining room, probably humming a little tune, deciding to write an R, and then in her happy little innocent way, deciding that the R wouldn't be done without a smile and a hat...

Just perfect.