Don't count on Mom for the sympathy vote

A couple days ago, I asked Fiona to take some surplus groceries to the basement pantry shelf. It's cold down there, so I usually recommend the kids put on slippers. Why do they like to go barefoot year-round otherwise, even when their feet are like ice?

She put on the slippers and began yelping with pain. "When I step down in my slippers, it really hurts!" If you could see her slippers, you might understand a little bit of my skepticism. It's hard to see any of her foot because of all the downy pink luxuriance.

I told her she was simply going to have to find a way to get down the stairs in her softy pink slippers with a load or two of jars. She did it, but she looked so genuinely pained when she was finished that I went out to the living room to look at her foot.

Sure enough, she had a pencil eraser-sized puncture wound in the arch of her foot, with a tender halo of pink around it and a bruise just beginning around the perimeter. I gasped in surprise. As it turns out, she had stepped on a horse's tiara the day before. Why I never heard about that is beyond me, considering I'm never further away than the washing machine.

No sooner than I began monitoring it with real concern, it began to disappear. I hung the offending tiara on her toe for the proof shots today. Fiona is tougher than I thought!