After a weekend spent ransacking our house for an upcoming garage sale and slaving over Eric's second grade Civil War project, we decided to reward ourselves with an after-dinner marshmallow roast. Ignoring the fact that it was cold, dark, and February, we built a fire in our outdoor fireplace, one of those small, round iron affairs that you can put on a patio, and dug out some old shish kebab skewers. Our neighbors, 9 year-old Anna and 7 year-old Victoria, joined us. There's nothing better than a properly toasted marshmallow, all golden brown, puffy crust atop a core of molten sugar, eaten directly off the stick. You can keep your fancy crème brulee and snooty truffles. I'd rather get my hands and nose sticky on a supermarket marshmallow any old day. The kids happily charred and ate an entire bag, shrieking whenever a marshmallow caught fire, their cheeks red from the cold and the excitement. Anna even told a scary story, the one about the lady whose severed head was held in place by just a green ribbon. A great time was had by all, but I must confess, especially by me.

Now that I'm expecting a child of my own, I find myself thinking more and more about what it means to be a parent. Truth is, I'm not fit for the job, what with being unable to read a thermometer and not really caring if the beds get made or not. I'd rather read a Harry Potter book than Dr. Spock. All of those choices at Babies 'R Us - strollers and jog strollers and umbrella strollers and twenty-two kinds of car seats and row upon row of bottles and nipples, pacifiers, binkies, and things that go in a baby's nose - overwhelm me. People ask me what I've bought for the baby and I'm embarrassed to admit that so far, I've purchased one item: a giant stuffed bunny named Bootsy Thunderfoot. I don't know how to find a pediatrician. I sit down to make serious lists of Things To Get For The Nursery and twenty minutes later find myself dreamily trying to recall all the words to "The Owl and the Pussycat". Luckily, I had the sense to marry a man who already had a child, a man who knows about things like bouncy seats and jumpy chairs and swing-y things and how to take a baby's temperature. He's a good father now, which is a tremendous comfort. He's made me feel serene about the whole thing. He's also stopped me from taking the painfully adorable baby pajamas my mom sent and trying them on the dog. (I planned to wash them afterwards, of course, in that way over-priced baby detergent. I may be unbalanced, but I'm not unhygienic.) He'll teach our baby all of the important practical things, like math and how to chew and not to stick things in the electrical sockets. The things that I'm good at, like cooking or spelling, aren't really useful skills for a baby, so I've been pondering what it is I can teach him or her. All I know about kids is how excellent it is to be one.

I know how sweet a stem of grass tastes, and how, on a spring evening, the whole world smells a little like watermelon. I know how it feels to let a puppy chew your nose, and that those white plastic things that sit on top of home-delivered pizza make great end tables for Barbie. Sleeping in a tent, in your own backyard, is as good as an African safari. Cheerios taste best if you eat them while seated cross-legged on the living room floor, watching cartoons as your parents sleep. There's no kind of tired like the tired you feel after a day of playing in the ocean and that night, in your bed, you can still feel and hear the waves crashing all around you. Finding out that pickles are really cucumbers is a momentous discovery. Brownies cooked in an Easy-Bake Oven remain gooey in the center no matter how long they stay under that lightbulb. Sparklers aren't fireworks; they're magic. The empty shell of a robin's egg will last for eleven years if you keep it in a jewelry box. There's exactly one moment in your whole life in which you'll ride a two-wheeler bike for the first time so it's a good idea to keep your eyes open and remember it. All candy is good candy, except for those odd chocolate-vanilla-strawberry coconut squares that only old ladies like. Matchbox cars and a pile of dirt will keep you going for an entire afternoon. True hope is that feeling you feel when, during dinner, you hear the jangle of the ice cream truck in the distance and study your dad to see if he'll roll his eyes and reach for his wallet. And when you get your ice cream cone and stand dripping in the street, the smell of truck exhaust becomes part of the taste. You like being rained on and getting your feet soaked in puddles. Sleet could mean snow and snow is something you roll in and eat, not shovel and curse. I could go on forever...about chocolate milk and colored pencils and glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty and Lite Brite and beach sand and what is your favorite color and agonizing over whether to be a pirate or a princess for Halloween...

Maybe, kids like me, who had to grow up too fast and too hard, never really grow up at all. That's an adult sort of theory, isn't it? But here's what I really believe: just like there's a tooth fairy, there's a "grow-up fairy". She visits us sometime in our teens or even early twenties and while we aren't looking, sprinkles us with a kind of magical forgetting dust. She pushes us out of the world of imagination and into the world itself. She helps us put kid stuff behind and get ready for jobs, taxes, mortgages, heartbreak and sensible clothes. She must be real, or there wouldn't be so many grown-ups who can't at all remember the very tiny and very wonderful things about being a kid. Somehow, though, I think she missed me. I've waited and waited to be worldly and sophisticated. I figured, any day now I'll be like the other adults, and I won't want to eat Popsicles anymore or jump on trampolines. So far it hasn't happened. Perhaps this is what I'm meant to teach my own child: that it's all so sweet, that it goes by so fast, and that, if you're lucky, the grow-up fairy will skip you too, and you'll never, ever have to give any of it up.