My progeny: four small feet of inspiration

Yesterday morning, my youngest daughter crawled on top of me in bed and said "Mama, get up! I will say cockadoodledoo to you! There is colour outside!" Even though I was still excruciatingly tired, I woke up because I was so intrigued by what she had just said. I could struggle for a creative way to say that the sun is shining, but how truthful and interesting it is to say that there is colour outside. (My oldest is just as creative: at four years old she said a passing train looked like a giant caterpillar -- check out that simile! An English major in the making!) My youngest's comment yesterday reminded me of a story by Richard Matheson called "Born of Man and Woman" in which a child raised in a basement refers to rain as "the water from upstairs." I am intrigued by voices like this, that try to find a way to describe something that they can't understand or explain or have no knowledge of. I have often heard the saying "Write what you know," but there is so much potential creativity hiding in the things we don't know, too. One day I might be able to write a book just based on all the amazing this my children say -- a children's book, anyway!