I feel like I don’t blog about Gal Smiley as much as my other two kids, and I’m hyper aware of this because she is the middle child and my mother is full of dire predictions about how she is going to grow up to be bitter and angry and wear black turtlenecks while creating performance art pieces on the streets of Paris. But the thing is, Gal Smiley is just pretty much normal. She has temper tantrums sometimes but in general she is a really sweet girl, extremely generous with her love, her time, and her belongings, kind to her sister and brother, and valuing family above all else. It’s kind of hard to mock that, you know?

She’s also by far our healthiest child, rarely getting sick and recovering quickly when she does. She still talks about “that one time” she threw up — compare to Captain Jelly Belly, who throws up on a weekly (if not daily) basis and who now is so cavalier about it that he can turn to the side while playing, barf, then go on playing like nothing has happened. We recently had her eyes checked for the first time and despite having two rather myopic parents, her eyes are healthy and show no signs of ever needing glasses. Our dentist assures us that she won’t need braces since she has small teeth that are not crowded at all, and a perfect bite.

It’s kind of a shame because there’s nothing she likes better than medicine, band-aids, and visiting the doctor. Figures.

As for hobbies, she likes the usual things — playing robot superheroes with her brother, baking muffins with Mommy, dressing up like a princess with her gal pals at school, watching Toopy and Binoo curled up on the couch with a cup of chocolate milk.

Also, she enjoys cutting.

I don’t mean the mental illness kind of way, Mom.

I just mean she really, really likes to cut stuff up with scissors. Pretty much every school day, she spends a large chunk of time just cutting stuff up — random paper, paper plates, tissues, PlayDoh. The teachers know that she’s a scissors whiz, and they just hand her a pair and let her go to town. Her typical daily school output includes a few drawings and a little pile of cut up bits. Thank goodness she doesn’t have a Special Box. Otherwise we’d be able to open our own confetti store.

At home it’s more of the same. Captain Jelly Belly is really into making books right now (sample title: “If you are a superhero and you see a superhero fighting a bad guy, always join in!”) so he’ll spend hours at the kitchen table drawing elabourate pictures and ordering them and adding a cover and then reading it over and talking about it, all the while Gal Smiley is…cutting. Cutting up pretty coloured paper into really small bits.

Yesterday she cut up a little toy plane, made of foam board, that she’d gotten at a birthday party on the weekend. Then I convinced her to do a gluing project, so she painstainingly glued several magazine pictures onto a piece of paper, and then…cut it up. Into bits.

It goes without saying that I have to keep her away from such important projects as homemade valentines and Father’s Day cards. Although Sir Monkeypants would probably understand that a little pile of bits that used to be a card is really a symbol of her undying love.

Maybe for her birthday I’ll get her a little “Cutters” shirt, like the ones in Breaking Away. “They want a fight, we’ll give ’em a fight!”

Oh, not that kind of cutter.