Warning: doting auntliness ahead

I'm on holiday, which is lovely. Staying with my big sister for a few days just outside of Brisbane, then getting something of a bachelorette pad going in town with Miss Y for the weekend. Flight was ridiculously easy (barely unplugged my ipod or looked up from That Book the whole time), but the first I knew that my sister had arrived at the airport to pick me up was being almost knocked down by a pink-tracksuit whirlwind in the shape of my nearly-four-year-old niece. Man, I can never get over how flattering it is to have kids be so overwhelmingly excited to see you. I rarely see the little one- she sees my other two younger sisters on an extremely regular basis, but I've been out of the country/state/loop for a while. So the fact that she remembers me at all is pretty awesome. The fact that she demanded the phone off my sister so she could ask me if I really was for real coming up for a visit was doubly awesome. The fact that she presented me with this gorgeous artist's rendition of me at the airport is just about the awesomest thing ever:

You can tell it's me because it has "spikally hair and five legs!".

Then we came home and had to dress up as fairy princesses for dinner (all my long-distance attempts to convert her to a pirate princess have failed, but at least she's gone for the 'karate-ninja-sumo-wrestler' style of fairy princessdom rather than the, you know, fussy, picky, action-phobic kind). Behold the fearsome fairy princess duo:

Not the best photo of me, but you try being hit at high speed repeatedly by the entire physical mass of a very small but very determined person, as she attempts to communicate over a course of hours just how very excited she is to see you. It's not good for your photo-face, I think you'll find.

I have been given kindy pick-up and drop-off duty for the next few days (a working mother has to take full advantage of any and all opportunities to foist the child off onto doting aunties, I am aware- signed that release form before I came) so it's entirely possible that I might decide she is only perhaps half as awesome as the entirety of human endeavour to date. But right now, nope, I'm convinced that she is brilliance. Sheer, tangle-haired, piercing-shrieked, "Auntie Ali you have to read me another story", "Tomorrow can we do a fairy dance?" brilliance.