Large Fierce Mammal

If she sticks with this whole princess and castle thing, I'll start teaching her swordsmanship soon.

Our niece Alyssa – otherwise known as Niece LFM – turned three today. Mrs. LFM and I just got back from celebrating the event. First time on a trampoline for either of us, and I can honestly say that I found it endlessly entertaining once I mastered the rhythm and technique required to repeatedly catapult a small child sitting on her bum nearly three feet in the air like an animated basketball that screams “Again! Again!”

At one point, Mrs. LFM grew thoughtful and then quietly remarked that, given more private circumstances, the item might lend itself to even more entertaining uses – something she was not surprised to learn had also occurred to me while watching her … bouncing. But, as usual, I digress. Never mind your foul thoughts that two such lustful ones as we should never be left to care for a child. But for lust, there would be no children to care for.

Alyssa has a voracious thirst for books and the stories they contain, but at three she hasn’t yet learned to read, so you know what that means. To commemorate Alyssa turning three today, a thing so incomparably unique that we doubt she will ever manage to pull it off again, here is …

Read to Me!

by LFM

“Read to me!”, Alyssa says
As soon as I come in,
Story after story book
She fetches from a bin.

I couldn’t bore her if I tried,
She loves my manly tones.
She’s gone from Homer’s Iliad
To bloody Game of Thrones.

But sad to tell, this reading thing
Served me an awful clout,
When half the way through Moby Dick
My reading bone gave out.

Until it mends, I cannot read,
Though one thing soothes the bite.
It doesn’t really hurt a bit
If all I do is write.