Second

She swings with a purpose, intense, pumping her entire body to force herself higher and higher into the impossibly brilliant sky. I know this is motion she craves, and she will swing longer and harder than any other child on the playground.

Then, she slows the swing and when it has reached the right level of power and height, hurls herself off the seat into the big beyond. Like flying. I would cringe, and I usually do, but this is my physically intense second child, and cringing is only an exercise for the overactive anxiety center of my brain. It does no good. "Learn the hard way" applies to her more than either of my other children. Some days, the world is just not big enough to contain her energy, and it spills, messy, and occasionally destructive.

She is a complicated balance of utter fearlessness and crushing anxiety. Scared, and dangerous, willing, and worried.

Her creativity knows no bounds. She creates entire worlds, characters, and complicated scenarios in which she is the heroine, the caretaker, the administrator. Or the horse.

Now, she gallops in the sunshine, legs pumping, propelling her forward as fast as she can make her muscles move her bones. She gallops across the playground and flings herself, leaping, down a terraced hill, over each one of the stone borders. If she were an event horse, galloping cross-country, this would be at least a two-star event. She is fearless, now, and gulps oxygen, and life, in great big quantities.

May she only learn to harness her power, and use it. Let it never be dampened, or extinguished.