Just like me?

A mom with two youngins stopped in the visitor center this morning. The alligator display immediately caught the kiddos' attentions. While talking to the older little girl, maybe three or four years old, I asked, "are you as big as that grown up alligator?" pointing at the tape stretched across the floor. She looked at it then dropped to the floor, stretching herself as long as she could parallel with the eighteen-foot length. "Nope!" she told me. Then she wanted to see if the stuffed alligator was a grown-up alligator or a kid alligator. So I carefully manhandled the four-foot stuffed gator (it is surprisingly light, if you can imagine, but I generally don't lift a lot of stuffed gators for comparison's sake) and laid it across the tape so she could see for herself. "Nope!" she said again. I said, "you are right, this is a kid alligator, probably only three or four years old." She lit up and said, "just like me, I am free, too!" The little girl paused a moment, looked at the alligator, then back at me. "So does the kid alligator go to preschool just like me?"

Those are the moments that light up my whole day.

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