Orthopaedics

While I was cooking dinner this evening, Emme was drawing in her notebook. She would talk to me as she drew, making comments here and there and asking me questions. All was peaceful as Brooke was playing with her puzzles and Celeste was quietly doing her homework.

Once I had dinner simmering on the stove, I took a break and sat next to Emme on the family room sofa.

"Mom, I'm finished with my drawing" she informed me.

Emme has made some pretty fantastic drawings. I was eager to see what she had been so diligently working on.

"They are body parts." said Emme, explaining the different sizes and shapes she had drawn in a seemingly random disorder.

"Look. Here are the toes." She showed me 5 toes placed at the top of the page. To the left were the arms. The middle of the page featured a circle with another smaller, darker circle in the middle. There were some dashes on the top that looked disturbingly like hair.

"What's that?" I winced pointing to the encircled spot with speck marks on top. I was hoping it wasn't a breast or worse.

"Oh. That's an eye" said my Emme. I breathed a sigh of relief.

That's how the page was. There was a nice set of teeth, a pair of thighs. There were upper arms and lower arms, not necessarily next to each other. A few circles represented knees and elbows. There was even a neck. Pretty much every part of the skeletal system (covered in skin) that Emme could think of was there. The entire page was filled.

As I mulled over Emme's curious work, she looked up at me with big hazel eyes.
"I want to be a doctor, but not just a regular doctor." She announced this with alarming lucidity.

"What kind of doctor do you want to be?" I asked.

"The kind that fixes body parts. I want to fix broken body parts Mommy."

"Oh. That's called an Orthopedist. Is that what you want to be when you grow up?"

Emme looked natural, as if she heard that word all the time.

"Yes. That's exactly what I want to be. An Orthopedist."

Celeste had been listening the whole time.

"How about you Celeste?" I asked. "What do you want to be?"

"Oh, I haven't really thought about it yet Mommy. I think I want to stay home until I'm 41 and then find a man."

Cool.