When my daughter was born, I'm ashamed to say the first thing I noticed was the length of her toes.  While the doctors and nurses commented on her precious face, framed by a head full of dark hair, a single thought resonated through my mind, narrated by my father's imaginary voice...  Oh Lord, she's inherited your tater toes! She could probably grip a limb with those babies!

         In case you're wondering, "tater toes" is an expression invented by my father to describe a phenomenon when one's toes resemble an order of McDonalds french fries.  And now, I'm very proud to report the expression will continue its vibrant life through my daughter.  Though she's still a toddler, I have absolutely no worries that she'll be able to hold her own even under the heaviest of scrutiny.

         Case in point:  I dress her to the nines when we leave the house, pulling her long brown hair into a little fountain ponytail on top.  Of course, an hour later, she's already pulled it out, hair hanging straight down into her eyes, looking like the offspring of Cousin It.

         While at the grocery store, an elderly woman smiles and says, "She's so adorable!"

         "Thank you," I say, while looking at my daughter, who has an index finger jammed into her right nostril.  I nonchalantly pull her hand away, and she swiftly returns the finger to its former position while staring defiantly at me.  This continues until the admirer walks away.

         Ah parenthood, there's really nothing like it, is there?  And as I ponder this, I glance across the room at my precious baby girl, who is vigorously shaking a floor lamp as though she is trying to get it to drop some sort of fruit.

         "No, no, Charlotte, don't do that!"

         She smiles and jams an index finger up her nose, a toddler's version of the middle finger.

Dreams are so fascinating and often serve us well as writers.  If we choose, we can use them to ride the tides of inspiration and create some wonderful stories.  Other times, perhaps we'd rather just thank God they aren't real and forget about them completely.

I woke up from an awful nightmare this morning, the kind where every muscle in my body ached when it was finished. This one included some extra special effects that made it particularly nasty.  I dreamed I was in a place that didn't resemble home at all. Something didn't feel quite right, so I lifted my shirt and there were at least fifty cockroaches crawling all over my abdomen.  I swear, if I were a horror writer, all of my stories would have cockroaches in them. I'm convinced they crawl here through the cracks of hell.

Quickly, I jumped up and began smacking them, but instead of falling off, their carcasses clung to me like an awful jelly with legs, only Smuckers wouldn't make a dime on this variety.  I couldn't seem to will my hands into wiping them off so they just continued to hang there. The dream finally ended while I was meandering around this strange place, raising my shirt every so often to look at the cockroach jelly on my abdomen, still too anxious to wipe it clean.

Freud would have a field day with me, wouldn't he?

Our subconscious is a funny thing, isn't it?  It's like a tiny person separate from us who sits inside our heads and watches our personal daytime soap opera on a television set behind our eyes.  Then, every so often, the little prankster plays a trick on us while we sleep at night by slipping a demented horror flick into the DVD player. 

I'd like to flick the little bugger out of there and squash him flat, like a cockroach.