After the bird I was dispatched to take pictures of someone dancing somewhere, traditional ethnic dancing, costumes etc and as I crouched down in front of the crowd with the horribly slow office digital camera (has a delay of over a second when you take a picture, so I have a lot of shots of the dancer’s back etc) a little South American girl about three years old came up to me and leaned right up against me like we were old buddies and watched the dancer on TV, through the video display viewfinder of my camera, following her around with her finger and eventually smearing the display with whatever she had for lunch.

Very, very cute. So cute I didn’t even tell her the tragic story of the unfortunate little girl:

… just about your age. She touched the display of a stranger’s digital camera once and it was the last thing she ever did, unless you count carbonizing. The camera’s capacitor was calibrated wrong and she got such a shock that all they found of her after the smoke cleared were a few toes deep down in one of her shoes.

I made up for that oversight when I got home by explaining to my youngest daughter, who asked if her cousin (family sent pictures) had grown that tall in indiscrete spurts or gradually, the way most people do it.

When he was born his head was the size it is now, and he had no body, just head. Then he grew a tail, from which sprouted first arms, then legs. Then the tail fell off. Pollywog birth, that’s called. It runs in the family. Your aunt Epsilon was that way too. Just a head, then tail. I remember how happy she was when she finally had arms, hairy little arms, like this [display own hairy arms] – she used to run around on her hands, as fast as anyone with legs. She could grab the back of a chair and swing herself up, no problem. She coiled her tail into a ring and sat her head down in that for support. It was almost an anticlimax when she got legs.