She Flies Through the Air
I just cleaned the walls in my house and pondered one of the mysteries of the universe. My cat-graceful daughter is a human who participates in no fewer than three sports and does, I might add, pretty well in all of them. Her reaction time is fast enough so that more than once when I've dropped something from the kitchen counter and she's caught it before it hit the ground; one time she did while balancing on one foot. She is, in sum, an agile child.
And yet she cannot walk down a hallway, or into a room, or around a corner, without touching the walls. It's like a chair-rail of fingerprints. Either the god to whom children answer demands sixty-eight wall-contacts each day, or moving while not on a sporting field makes her dizzy.
Or, more likely, healthy and active children do, in fact, bounce off the walls.
posted by Unknown at 1:00 PM
15 Comments:
I always did that, too! I think it's more a fun thing. You sort of swing around the corner that way. haha I wasn't really consciously aware of why I was doing it at the time, though. Hmmm...
a chair-rail of fingerprints
Ha! I have one of those too. I also have a chair-rail of nose prints a little farther down, and another one a little below that. Apparently the dogs and the cats like to bounce off the walls too.
more proof that children are these amazing creatures that adults rarely understand but remember being...and misunderstood too.
there is logic hidden somewhere in the above sentence.
The only cure for that is to put them in charge of cleaning the walls.
My boys used to put there feet on the wall while plopped on the bed. USED to! : )
Heh. Both of my kids do this and it drives their dad batty. Our apartment has a long hallway and if you look closely, you can see that it has racing stripes.
For most kids it is about the tactile feel of the wall.
For some kids if they don't hold on they just float away on daydreams.
A happy child lives not in a perfectly clean home but one where she can run her little hands down the hallway, skipping and singing as she goes. That is music to a mama's ears and I'll take the fingerprints anyday as long as she is here to enrich me with her presence.
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I'm not sure she'll grow out of it. My office shares a wall with a common hallway, which is papered with textured paper. I always know when two guys in particular are walking down the hall b/c they both run their fingers along the wall, making a very distinctive sound. It bugged the heck out of me until I figured out what they were doing. In my last office, the boss banned all cheesy snacks (really, he did) b/c he got sick of cheesy fingerprints on the walls.
Fingerprints could make an interesting wallpaper border (applied at chair rail height, of course. New business oppty? xx
I have a gorgeous abstract art piece on the glass of my back patio door made from snot and grease and saliva. I dare not Windex it off for fear that it will increase in value.
Um yeah..all 3 of my kids do this...it is the way they are wired. Sometimes I imagine the germs the pick up from touching everything (like all the hand rails at Disney world-YUCK!)
Your last line is so correct. I know that walls rattle in this house when my son is home. He uses the walls as guides, not to pass through blithely without making contact, but like the gutter on a bowling lane.
You're a brilliant writer. I'm hooked!
Oh yes, the dirty walls. Dirty white walls from fingerprints of very busy children. They think it is fun to clean the walls, because they like using the cleaning supplies.
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