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We take turns answering the call, and L doesn’t seem to matter who responds.

“Yes, sweetheart,” I say as I open the door, and I immediately one of several possible answers. Sometimes it’s just a fragment of a story she remembered; sometimes it’s something straight from her imagination. It could be that she needs juice or that she wants to rock with me in the rocking chair for a moment. Occasionally she’s not pleased with the sleeping music.

“Yes, L,” I say tonight as I enter her room.

“We didn’t rock,” she replies calmly.

I take her out of her bed and sit with her own my lap. Usually she’s a little squirmy. Tonight she’s too tired to squirm.

Out of the blue, she opens the age-old conversation: “Tata, I don’t want to grow up.”

“You don’t have a choice. None of us do.” I think this, but I certainly don’t say it. Instead, I simply ask her if she likes being three.

“Yes,” she says quietly. She snuggles a little closer, pauses, and leaves me speechless, whispering, “Three’s easy.”

When shopping for our kite, there was only one criterion: there must be a princess on it.

“I’m not a _____! I’m a princess!” L is fond of saying these days. In the blank can be just about anything, even “little girl” (or “big girl” for that matter). Once the princess kite was assembled

and launched, L was fascinated.

For about three minutes.

Much more inviting were the rocks and twigs scattered about.

As a kid, I’d always wanted to go there. All my friends went there during the summer, and for us southwest Virginians, it was at least a seven-hour journey. It was not a place where one merely spent the weekend.

I finally went to Myrtle Beach this weekend for a middle school conference. It was everything I expected.

All decor seemed to have a heavy-handed marine theme, especially for the restaurants

and the stores. My companions and I wondered about the warmth of being invited into a shark’s mouth for a little shopping

Given the fact that all such shops are peddling to tourist, it seems somehow perfectly appropriate.

The kitsch extended all the way to the oceanfront, with hotels painted colors that only rarely occur in nature.

And then there were the mini-golf courses. We counted at least twelve on the main road, each with a different theme applied to the same goal: knock a golf ball through some obstacle.

“Who knew that the market could support this number of courses,” I muttered as we passed by yet another.

But we weren’t there for entertainment but for education, and we all received enough information to make us wish we could turn back the calendar to the beginning of the year and start again. In that sense — as well as the collection of mini-golf shots — it was a greatly successful weekend.