My mom bought Willow a romper with a quote from William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night Dream" stamped across the front, dark pink lettering on a light pink shirt.
"Though she be but little, she is fierce!"
The line comes during a fight between a woman and her smaller opponent. The smaller fighter uses her fierceness to compensate for the size disadvantage.
Willow isn't a small girl in her toddler world. Not by a long shot. She's as big as tots six months older than she. But she is shy of them in understanding the world around her.
And when you observe Willow in the larger scope, the one that includes me and you and billions of other grown-ups on the world's stage, she is quite small.
But this disparity in size, and in understanding, means little to Miss Willow.
She is fierce.
Fiercely determined to do, to learn, to be.
Much of this fierceness earns Willow the admiration of Mommy and Daddy, and of grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles and cousins. And her peers, I think, admire her too, in as much as they can (usually by chirping and yelping affirmations at my little girl).
We admire her go-do attitude. "That kid scaled those steps; I can do that to." "That kid claps (and Mommy does too) I can clap too."
And much of Willow's fierceness earns her an exasperated daddy. She is quite determined, for example, to conquer Daddy's pillow fort that protects the lamp and Glade plug-in in the corner (and I've given up on protecting my newly bought Roku video streamer from her; her fierce determination to get to it trumps my determination to keep it from her).
Willow is a doer. She is a communicator.
And though she is far from mastering these things, she is fiercely determined to do them.
I adore that in her, when it shines in her good deeds or the bad.
I admire her fierceness either way.
"Though she be but little, she is fierce!"
The line comes during a fight between a woman and her smaller opponent. The smaller fighter uses her fierceness to compensate for the size disadvantage.
Willow isn't a small girl in her toddler world. Not by a long shot. She's as big as tots six months older than she. But she is shy of them in understanding the world around her.
And when you observe Willow in the larger scope, the one that includes me and you and billions of other grown-ups on the world's stage, she is quite small.
But this disparity in size, and in understanding, means little to Miss Willow.
She is fierce.
Fiercely determined to do, to learn, to be.
Much of this fierceness earns Willow the admiration of Mommy and Daddy, and of grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles and cousins. And her peers, I think, admire her too, in as much as they can (usually by chirping and yelping affirmations at my little girl).
We admire her go-do attitude. "That kid scaled those steps; I can do that to." "That kid claps (and Mommy does too) I can clap too."
And much of Willow's fierceness earns her an exasperated daddy. She is quite determined, for example, to conquer Daddy's pillow fort that protects the lamp and Glade plug-in in the corner (and I've given up on protecting my newly bought Roku video streamer from her; her fierce determination to get to it trumps my determination to keep it from her).
Willow is a doer. She is a communicator.
And though she is far from mastering these things, she is fiercely determined to do them.
I adore that in her, when it shines in her good deeds or the bad.
I admire her fierceness either way.
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