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My daughter is too smart for her own good. She’s two now, but it won’t be long until she’s sixteen and twisting my pinky for the keys to the car so she can go driving with her friends. I have no doubt in my mind that when this happens, I’ll need one of those portable defibralators at all times. I’ll also have to buy a shotgun and stay up late on Friday nights because she’s on a date. My wife constantly gets on me because I stay up late at night. My excuse is that my creative juices start flowing in the night hours and that’s when I work best on my writing. The truth is, I’m conditioning my body to require only two hours of sleep a day so that when my daughter is dating, she can’t sneak past me when she comes home because I fell asleep waiting up for her.

Fortunately, that won’t happen for another 14 years or so. Until then, I have to deal with her as a toddler. Which isn’t much different.

Take tonight, for example. I’m not sure exactly how she does this. Somehow, her mind can stretch so far beyond her skull these days that I am no longer able to keep any secrets from her. She can perceive things so unbelievably imperceptable that even my mom - who is world renowned for having eyes in the back of her head - couldn’t perceive them. I know this because I tried to hide a bag of chocolates from my daughter, and failed miserably.

It is well known that Monkey sometimes requires certain exceptional tools to be employed in order to go to sleep at night. Sometimes, one of these tools is my van. No, I don’t run her over with it. I put her in it and take her for drives. She enjoys these and so do I. The jaunt down one of the roads I like most takes us to a well known Arizona river just about five minutes east of us. I’ll drive her down to this place, which we call our “turnaround spot”, and then I wake up because it’s late at night and I’ve fallen asleep and driven into the river and now the van is filling with deathly cold water.

No, just kidding. There is no water in Arizona. Seriously, I turn around and travel that very same road back home. It’s no more than a 15-minute drive and by the time I get back, Monkey is usually asleep. If not, there’s a set of housing developments close by that I’ll drive through because they have ample supplies of two-by-four beams.

For tonight’s drive, I decided to bring along one of my snacks from my diet program - Nutrisystem Chocolate Crunches or something like that. They’re not really crunchy, but they are most definitely chocolate, and that’s really all that’s important. They’re are very good, and I’ve ordered 16 packages of them in this month’s food shipment. The trouble is Monkey likes them, too.

To avoid having to deal with her crying out for her share of the chocolates, I tried to sneak them into the darkened van. But Monkey would have none of that. Here’s the exact exchange that took place the moment the stupid chocolates bag crinkled after I opened it.

Monkey: What do you have?

Me: Nothing I can share with you, honey. Just go to sleep.

Monkey: I want chocolate!

How did she know I had chocolate?! I gave no indication that I had it. Her carseat is all the way in the back of the van. An entire bench separates my driver’s seat from hers. I had my hand over the package, and i had it tucked low in my lap as to not make nary a sound when I opened it. Clearly it was out of view of the optical processing units of this moppet. How in the name of Bob did she know that I had chocolates?

It must be a female thing.

My wife told me that Monkey must have smelled it. If that’s the case, I curse the day the manufacturer installed her olfactory system. I think maybe someone on the assembly line got distracted. Maybe this person was getting really involved in a conversation with the optic guys, and wasn’t paying attention and allowed too many olfactory nanites to be poured into the nasal cavity. I don’t know. I’m not a biological engineer. All I know is that somehow, my little Monkey has perception capabilities that exceed those of my own mother’s, and that can only mean trouble for me when she gets older.

Now this is a pretty funny story in and of itself, but there’s more to this little tale that isn’t directly related to sniffer capabilities, but they do play a part in it none the less. I relayed this story to Wifey after I got home and put Monkey in her sleep unit. Wifey was so highly amused that she broke wind. That’s right, she laughed so hard that she pushed gas out both ends. This only caused more amusment on her part. She then told me to tell the tale to my mother-in-law. She became highly amused, as well.

I have to admit, I never really wanted to know where my wife gets her flatulation capabilities, but I found out anyway. It’s one thing when your wife farts. It’s quite another when your mother-in-law does it. I can only hope that Monkey is blessed with roses, if you get my drift.