✅ The Baby Makers

Pictures of You

"Yep, it does." Phil seemed so proud of Stacie recognising the smell of flowers, and so she was really proud even if she thought it should have been easy. "Can you tell me what kind of flowers they are?"

Stacie raised the sheet of paper up to her nose and took another deep breath. Her head felt like it was filling with pink fog, just like she'd expected, and everything she was thinking got a bit more confused. Her thoughts weren't slow now, they were all excited and jumping up and down, all trying to get her attention. One thing was still clear, though. Phil had asked her a question, and she had to impress him.

"Roses!" she exclaimed cheerfully, "Pink roses, special magic ones that fills my head up with pink fog!"

"You're a very clever little girl," he smiled, "I didn't expect you to know that. Do you like feeling your head get all foggy?"

"Yep!" Stacie's head bobbed up and down, an excited nod that almost made her heck hurt. She knew she'd tell Doctor Phil anything he wanted now, and she hoped there wasn't anything she might say that would make him not like her anymore. "I don't got to think about everything and everything's so funny and I know you'll only make me do things I like!"

"Good girl," he answered, and all her thoughts about the paper, or the fuzziness filling her head, quickly drained away. All that mattered was doing whatever she could to be a good girl, and to make Doctor Phil smile.

As the fog in her head cleared a little, she saw a whole rainbow of crayons spread out around her, and remembered that she was supposed to be drawing a picture. So she searched among the many colours and eventually found the least exciting thing possible: a pencil. She knew there had to be one in there somewhere, and she knew that she could do a better picture if she sketched the lines first. She had to decide what to draw, though.

She turned around and looked at Doctor Phil, standing there so proud of her and all the things she'd done. She knew then what to draw. She could draw her and Doctor Phil, playing in the huge gardens around this house. That was the biggest reward she could think of giving anyone, and she was sure it would make him happy.

She started sketching with the pencil, but it was harder than she'd expected. She stumbled and dropped her pencil once or twice, and then when she looked at what she'd drawn so far, it wasn't cute or exciting. It was just a bunch of lines, trying to get the shape of the picture right. If she kept on taking this long, it would be hours before she even had any colours on the page. She knew she had to try to be patient, but it was a lot harder than it usually was. Maybe if she took another sniff of the flowery paper, she might worry less and be able to just do her drawing.

A sniff, and her head was filled with pink fog. Her picture was pretty good, she thought, and it would look even better when she coloured it in. She picked up a blue crayon, and started to colour the sky. It was hard to hold it straight because she wasn't used to her fingers being so small, but once she wrapped her fist around it she could make big blue lines across the sky.

"Can't wait?" Phil asked, and he was laughing too. That made Stacie grin even more, knowing that she'd made the most important person in her world happy. "It doesn't have to be perfect, I just want you to have fun doing it. It's the fun that counts."

Stacie nodded and grinned. She looked back at her picture and realised she'd gone over where the sun was going to be with blue. But it didn't matter; Phil said it didn't need to be perfect. So she grabbed the next colour, yellow for the sun, and drew a big circle in a bit of sky that wasn't all blue yet. Then she shaded it in, drawing spirals around and around until it made her dizzy and she didn't know where she'd started. The circle was all filled in with yellow by then, with just a few lines that looked a bit blue. He was right, like always. It looked just as good if she didn't stick with her pencil drawing. She didn't need the drawing at all, she could just have fun with her crayons.

She'd drawn a figure to represent herself in black and silver before long. She couldn't draw black stars on top of the silver, or silver stars on the black bits, because the crayons were too thick. But she could put stars around the little-girl-sized stick figure, and that was good enough. She caught Phil smiling when he looked at it, anyway, and that was all that mattered to her.

Then she had to draw Phil himself, but she wanted to surprise him. She didn't want him to know that she was drawing him until she showed him the finished picture. So she tried to sneak a look at him without him seeing she was watching so closely. She turned her head around slowly, looked at the colour of his shoes, and then saw that he was looking at her, so she jerked her head back before he could notice. She grabbed a crayon and shaded in his black shoes. Then she looked at his trousers, which were also black. But this wasn't the same kind of black, and she wondered why the crayons only had one colour of black. Maybe, if she looked at it right, those trousers might be a very, very dark blue. So she took the crayon labelled 'midnight blue' and drew a couple of lines for his trousers, and then scribbled over them in black. That should make them darker, mixing colours together, but it didn't seem to make any difference that she could see. Well, it was blue. That would be good enough.

"Wow, mixing colours," Phil's voice surprised her so much she would have dropped the black, if she hadn't just put it down. "You're putting a lot of effort into getting the right colours on whatever you're drawing. If you were any littler, you wouldn't even care about getting the right colours, you'd just pick a colour that looks pretty for each piece."

Stacie nodded and smiled, and then decided that she was going to use purple next. Her fingers were getting clumsier as they shrank, and she picked up the crayon and shifted it in her hand three or four times before she could hold it without it wobbling. She knew Phil had made her littler, and she was so glad about that. It felt wonderful to do what he wanted her to do, and she wouldn't trade that feeling for anything. She quickly started drawing in his jacket. She thought his real one was probably black, but she was sure that a red one would be cooler, so he'd like that more.

Next she drew in his tie, which had to be green because it was such a nice colour, just a bit paler than the grass around them in the garden. And then a head to make him look like a person, and she could start drawing in where they were. Grass, and flowers, and trees, and the house behind them would make the white page into the gardens around here, she was sure.