What Is Your Tipping Point?

In the dictionary, next to the word ‘Petite,’ is a picture of our girl A. She is a lovely creature of 8 years that is delicate and has the appearance of a quiet and calm little girl. In kindergarten her teacher nicknamed her Mary Poppins (practically perfect in every way).

Anyone that meets our girls for the first time, besides remarketing on how respectful, kind and beautiful they are (I am in no way being biased here), also remark on how quiet A is. Her sisters have to stifle laughs.

A, once she is comfortable with her surroundings and the people around her, is a Tasmanian devil. She laughs like a crazy girl, tells jokes, plays pranks, and can be so loud as to pop eardrums.

A few months ago, she had a rather humiliating experience, funny though, that came about because of those nasty physical laws. Namely, those of ‘gravity’ (is in, center of) and ‘inertia.’

The mornings we don’t drive our girls to school, they take the bus. Since we are in a rather isolated area with a country road posting a speed limit of 45 that often has rednecks as well as the rural upper-crust doing 80-90MPH, we drive our girls out to the end of our driveway where the bus picks them up. They stay in the car until we see the bus pulling up.

Our driveway ends with a slope up to the road, and a ditch for water drainage that runs along our road frontage (about 500 feet or so), creating a 3 foot drop-off from the road all along it. One day not too long ago, as the bus came into view our van doors opened, and out jumped our girls.

A was out first, and was waiting for her older sisters to get out. She backed up from the van door, giving them room, but backed up just a bit too far.

The weight of her backpack, stuffed with books and folders, and riding high on her little frame, tipped her backwards. She was bending back like a tree in a heavy wind, swinging her arms wildly in a desperate attempt to balance, and shortly afterwards hit the tipping point. She fell backwards, down the ditch, rolling several times to the bottom while 40 kids in the bus watched every roll.

There was that pause, except for our oldest K, when you want to be sure the person that has encountered a mishap is not hurt before you bust out laughing.

A was ok- it was evident from her raucous laughter as she lay at the bottom of the ditch looking up.

FYI- I got her permission to write this. Also, if you're wondering, she can eat like a horse. On pizza night she can easily down 4-5 pieces along with plenty of Coke. I wish I had her metabolism.







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