This evening Lydia walked up to me with a rather sour look on her face. She was holding a screwdriver upside down in her fist, and I could see that the handle was fairly wet.

“Daddy,” she said, smacking her lips and scrapping her tongue on her teeth. “This tastes really yucky. It doesn’t taste like ice cream at all!”

I stared at her for a few moments, trying to determine whether she was joking or not. She wasn’t. She was serious about having tried to eat my screwdriver like a Popsicle.

“Lydia…” I took the wet screwdriver and placed it on the desk, and then took both of the little girl’s shoulders in each of my hands so I could bend my face to her level. “Lydia, why did you think that would taste like ice cream?”

“I thought-” she began, and then caught her self, turning her head to look around the corners of the room for more convincing words. “I mean…” she chewed her lip for a second. “My pet dragon said that it would taste like rainbow ice cream.”

I squinted my eyes at her. She looked my direction for half a second out the corner of her eye. “Well,” I told her finally, letting go of her shoulders. “Let this be a lesson to not do everything your pet dragon tells you to do. Okay?”

She nodded, and then propelled herself across the room like a rocket. The last I saw of her was a small pink ball rolling the wrong way up the stairs in blurry defiance of all known laws of physics and logic.