That precious little girl was all I could focus on and everything, including the preceding thirteen hours of agony, was forgotten.  Convertibles?  Trips?  Who needed them?  What could I possibly have been thinking?  We used to have a neighbor who would bring her son to daycare even on days she didn’t work just so she could have the house to herself.  I don’t understand her — not wanting her child with her as often as possible, but it was her call.  Maybe she didn’t know about time yet and how quickly it passes, or children and how fast they grow.  When my oldest was almost a year old, I found myself in a desperate situation in which for the first and last time, I had to leave her with a sitter.  I would drop her off and call the sitter from the cell phone outside her door to ask how my daughter was taking the separation.  Apparently, she was taking it a whole lot better than I was.  I would arrive at work tearful and guilt ridden and unable to concentrate on anything but my daughter.  I was useless.  This lasted three days…Three of the longest days in recorded history.  I finally couldn’t stand it another day and took a leave of absence so I could stay home.  My friends all thought I was nuts, not to mention silly and overprotective, but I wanted to be with my child.  Wouldn’t you know it, during those three short days, my little girl took her first step – for the sitter.  I never forgave myself.  Nor did I ever leave her with a sitter again.  At home, this little character would not only drop the television remote in her father’s drinking glass.  When she wasn’t doing that, she was taking it apart.  More than just taking the back off and batteries out, she would take the entire thing apart down to the transistor pad.

 She would then put it back together, including the batteries, testing it to see if it worked.  If it did not, she would take the batteries back out, adjusting their polarity, and return them to the remote for retesting.  When the remote worked, I would have a moment of gleeful reflection as to what it must have been like to be Einstein’s mom.  She would then jar me back into reality, putting things back in perspective by holding the remote to her ear and saying, “Heh-woe.”