The 4-year-old part II

The Mayor
This child's parents do not need to check him in - everyone knows he's arrived because of the throng of kids and parents around him (I'm using he for ease of writing - girls can be mayors, too). Everything is a pleasure with this kid - last month, the office needed to create a "turn sheet" so that we might avoid the epic "Chicanery at the the Checkup," where 2 black eyes, a bruised spleen and a fractured tailbone resulted from the scrum before his last appointment.

The parents discuss their financial woes, since they've taken out a second mortgage to help fund birthday party gifting: the family even got a phone call last week from the Royal Family of Zamunda. Fathers at these birthday parties can be heard calling him "The Cool Kid," and they jockey for the chance to play on his knee-hockey team. This kid is pretty much always happy, and is very perceptive of others feelings - last week, he told his preschool teacher something was bothering his friend, and that friend was subsequently diagnosed with ADHD. Because of his uncanny ability to do everything right, philosophers the world over set their world compass to him. It's hard to miss this child - he's always surrounded by kids and paparazzi.

The Pistol

You know this girl is a pistol because, on hearing you call her a pistol, she cocks her head, puts her hands on her hips, and points at you with a crooked, chubby finger, saying, "Hey, what's a pistol?" Though she is loud, she contrasts with the Devil (of part I) because of the burstiness of her loudness: giant, block-like "HA-HA-HA"s emerge from her mouth when she laughs, large enough to crush me against the wall. But in case you're wondering, she's a pistol not for her tiny attention span, but because the rest of us are adrift in the rocky seas of her monologue that she occasionally opens to us for unclear reasons.

First, she's talking about Matt, the kid in preschool that she clocked the other day for accidentally sitting on her snack, then we're talking about how she can't help me look in her nose, because she "can't look at the sky, Dr. D - the ceiling is in the way." Then we're reviewing that she knows why chewing her fingernails is bad - "tiny snots too small to see live there," and she can't get them out no matter how hard she tries, but she just HAS to chew her fingernails. Inevitably, this child is obscenely cute, has dimples, red hair, and a WICKED New England accent, and is barefoot or in shorts when her parents would prefer for her to be in shoes and pants. Signs she's been around? Your ears are ringing, but you're cracking up.

Possible future thumbnails - The Ostrich and the Tank