Tonight, before going to sleep, Chiara asked me to buy her a tiara (ha!). Being a mean mom, I said that I wouldn’t buy her a tiara. “But Oma,” she said, “I get jealous of the girls in my class who have tiaras.”

Seriously, I was in an impatient, somewhat irritable mood. It’s been a long week of late nights getting our taxes done (yay, all done before Friday so my weekend won’t be ruined with tax homework). I just wanted to leave their room and relax. “Chiara, jealousy can be a good thing. You can’t have everything you want. You have to examine your feelings and decide whether this is really something you want and then make it happen if so. Or let it go.”

Chiara replies: “Give me money and I’ll buy it myself!”

In her habitual bedtime postponement routine, Chiara starts to ask lots of questions, or suddenly remembers something that happened that day even though she previously said she remembered nothing.

So tonight, Chiara asks, “Oma, how did the first person in the world know everything?”