All wet and sparkly

Picture this. Your daughter is playing in her room. Suddenly there's a loud crash, three seconds of stunned silence, then the piercing scream of a 5-year-old in turmoil. You run upstairs to find her soaking wet and covered in sparkles.

What could possibly have happened?

On Monday night my wife was out, Nat and Jess were upstairs playing, and I like a good, watchful father, was bumming around on the computer and ignoring my children. Natalie was busy hosting a surprise birthday party for her imaginary friend, Alicia.

The party was going well, from what I could hear filtering down the stairs. All her imaginary friends were there, the imaginary cake was cut, the imaginary presents (which were actually grocery bags filled with random crap from throughout the house) were being opened, and the imaginary list of names for thank you notes was being maintained by Jessica (who of course can't write). There was only one thing missing...music.

Natalie decided that, to keep the flow of the party going, she should play some tunes from her carousel horse music box/snow globe on her dresser. This thing is a beautifully decorated snow globe with a carousel horse in it, and a typical wind-up music box in the base. It weights a good five pounds.

She picked it up off her dresser, and attempted to wind up the key on the bottom. Trouble is, she turned the key the wrong way and ended up unscrewing it. The key promptly disappeared down her sleeve. As she shook her sleeve trying to get the key out, she somewhat absentmindedly placed the snow globe back on the very edge of the dresser with her other hand. The key fell to the floor, and as she bent down to pick it up, the snow globe toppled off the counter and smashed over her head.

How she escaped major injury is beyond me. But when I found her she was, as I stated earlier, soaking wet and covered in sparkles. The sparkles were a combination of tiny shards of glass and sparkly snow globe contents. When I asked her "are you ok?" and "what happened?", I was only able to get, "WWWAAHHWWHAAGGGHSNOWGLOBEHEADBROKEWETWEAAHHWAAAAGGGGHH!" out of her, so I proceeded down the trail of forensic science without any input from her. Soon she calmed down just enough to demand that mommy get home. Given the amount of glass all over her and her bedroom floor, and the fact that Jessica was left unattended in her kitchen stool downstairs, I figured that was probably a wise idea.

So we called mommy, at which point Natalie attempted to explain over the phone how the snow globe attacked her, and how we need to go back to the Carousel Museum in Bristol, CT to buy her a new one NOW, and how even in the movie Madagascar they always had a supply of snow globes, and how life just won't be worth living without a snow globe in her room and how no one fixes booboos like mommy and how Alicia's party is ruined and how she wants grapes as a snack before bedtime. At some point I did manage to get a word in to Let my wife know that there was no blood and that she shouldn't panic.

Jessica, meanwhile noticed that Natalie seemed to be sucking up a particularly high volume of attention from mom and dad. She grabbed the phone and told mommy, "I fell and hit my head on the paper bag." This was true. Minor, but very important in a two-year-old's mind for the purposes of equal attention.

So if anyone asks why we missed last Monday's episode of 24, there ya go.