This is what I get for making her clean up her room

Last Tuesday, Daughter and I set about the task of cleaning up her room.

Like most preschoolers, Daughter subscribes to the theory that if having one toy out is fun, then having all the toys spread evenly over the entire floor is as close to Disney World as you can get without actually going there.

Daughter is also very artistic. Very, very artistic for a four year old. I've been meaning to scan some of her work and post it here, but I'm a lazy slob, so you'll just have to take my word for it. Anyhow, all of that is to say that her intense art sessions create some formidable messes of their own. What with the scissors and markers and paper and all.

Put simply, cleaning Daughter's room will make you crazy.

Getting back to our story, we were about halfway through our cleanup last week when I moved to the corner of her room where she works on her art projects. I was going to gather up all the tiny scraps of paper on which she had drawn cookies, tea, crayons (she uses markers to draw pictures of crayons - pretty mind-bottling, eh?), so I grabbed a little shoe box.

Judging from the weight of the box, there was nothing in it, so I pulled the top off and started to fill the box with paper scraps.

And that's when I heard this:

"NNNNNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! DAAAAADDDDDYYYYYYYY!!!"

I froze long enough to feel about 10% of my hair turn gray in real time, then I spun around to see if she was hurt, bleeding or on fire. Those were the only possibilities I could imagine to justify the blood-curdling shriek.

"What is it, honey?" I asked her.

"MY FINGERNAILS!!" she shot back, with a panicked look on her face.

"What about them?" I asked. "Did you hurt one of your fingers?"

"No Daddy. That box. That's my fingernail box!" she said.

She bounced over and snatched the shoebox from my hands and removed the paper scraps I had so carelessly put in there.

"See?" she asked.

I looked down in the corner of the box and saw a pile of little girl fingernails. She's apparently been administering her own manicures and keeps her clippings as souvenirs. Or maybe she saves them for some future craft project. I'm still not quite sure.

As hard as it may be to believe, it's actually quite difficult to get a straight answer as to why a child is saving her clipped fingernails from a child who saves her clipped fingernails.

And even though I think it's a touch creepy, I let her keep her fingernail collection. If I can keep her focused on her nails, it will hopefully keep her from dreaming up an even grosser alternative.