Skip rope

My dear daughter is truly a female. Last night, after the kids had supposedly gone to bed, I heard Fiona and Alex talking. She had come to him with her emotional angst about friends at school, and he was patiently listening and trying to allow her to vent, though he was really just sleepy! I went and gathered her up and took her to the study couch to listen a bit (and to allow Alex to get some rest!).
It was nice to cuddle on the couch, and she felt better very quickly as I listened and tried to understand what was bothering her. While I meant to be simply validating, I fell into the fix-it mode about her playground issues--some of which involved BORING games that other kids always wanted to play.
Anyhow, I asked about games like hopscotch and jump rope. Isn't there always a group of girls who play with jump ropes every day at recess? They have their rhymes--"Cinderella dressed in yella..."--and it always seemed like a fun activity to pass the time. Fiona was actually interested in both of these ideas, and she's going to find out if it's all right for her to bring a jump rope to recess (who knows, perhaps it's considered a weapon...). She'll go ahead and bring in some sidewalk chalk next week.
That was last night, and then early this morning I looked up and printed out Skip Rope Rhymes off of the internet for her. As I later cleaned breakfast dishes, I listened to Sophie Kinsella's book, Remember Me?, and Lexie is recalling meeting her best friend Fee (as in Fiona!) on the playground when she was six and Fee came up and told her that her skip rope was rubbish and then let her play with Fee's own skip rope! I know I'm always pointing out coincidences, but wow...how often do I read about a Fiona on a playground with a jump rope, especially in books that aren't written for kids?
No, I don't blog all the coincidences that occur, and they do seem to happen at a very high and surprising rate.

Oh, while I'm talking about uncanny intuitive happenings, Michael was talking about putting shingles on the nesting box lid a couple of days ago. I was talking about adding a knob off the front of the lid and fell silent, with a ridiculous silly image in my head of Michael shingling the top of the knob! It was too stupid and silly to even say, but Michael laughed and said, "What? You want me to shingle the knob?" I was flabbergasted! How could he have known that absurd thought was in my head? He said that he read it in my expression! I know I'm an open book, but that blew me away...