Weekday mornings offer lessons in humility. There never ceases to be that moment of stunning absurdity which manages to put the entire routine in perspective. Take for example, the day yours truly realized he was low on gas.

This was met with the requisite eye-rolling from The Diva, who somehow found it more humiliating to pull into a gas station at 8:30 in the morning than to be stuck on the side of the road a mile from school while the buses passed by with numerous friends and enemies leering out the window, pointing and throwing whatever happened to be laying around, as she thumbed her way to home room.

Fortunately, all it takes is a couple of sticks of Juicy Fruit and The Diva's all smiles. Granted, she'd never chew Juicy Fruit, but it's way funnier to read than whatever she actually asked for. But for the most part, The Diva is void of surprises. She'd rather just listen to the radio and pass the time plotting my demise. (At least in my mind that's what her silence foreshadows.)

No, most of the morning's amusement comes from Jellybean.

It's taken roughly two years but we've finally fallen into a fairly predictable pattern that starts with Pop-Tarts and an episode of “Dora the Explorer” and ends with a race to the front of the house and back.

Jellybean insists on running from the garage to the front stoop each and every morning, leaping over cracks in the concrete as she goes. And like any great athlete, she won't set a toe in motion without a loud, “Ready. Set. Go!”

Once she makes her morning lap, Jellybean's ready to go, but rarely before sharing a (weird and generally unsolicited) word — or 20 – of wisdom. For example, recently she told me that, “the giant came after me with a pair of scissors that were really, really sharp and cut me on the leg until I was dead but then I cut him in the mouth and used my blood to make him dead like a vampire.”

There's no genesis for that bit of dark poetry, though I must confess this sweet child o' mine has been leaning toward the morose of late. Maybe it's too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer or she's learning to read between the lines of Lama, Lama Red Pajama.

Save for this morning, when, after being strapped into her pink car seat, she silently surveyed the floor and backseats of the family SUV and said, “Daddy. Your car is nasty.”

I was taken aback, not because it wasn't true but because she acted as if it were my fault. Notice the front seat was void of bits of old Pop-Tart or cheese crackers, there were no stacks of Sweet Pickles books, no chewed pieces of pink gum, no gnawed-on lollipops sticks, half-full sippe cups of milk and certainly no tiny pairs of shoes or snapped hair-pulling-back things.

And yet Jellybean was acting as though it had all magically appeared when she was in daycare and therefore was totally innocent of guilt or blame. But what she was really saying – three-year-olds are masters of deflection – was, “Daddy, why can you not clean my chariot therefore forcing me to ride in such squalor? I fear you may soon be replaced by some who takes pride in their work.”

Kinda makes me wish she'd get another visit from that imaginary scissors-wielding giant. At least I wouldn't have to clean up after that.