CH 9

Children were quick to adapt.

At first, Saki-chan was scared when she saw Mika-san’s (my) face, but recently she started to talk to me on her own little by little.

She may not have understood it in her head, but as she was praised with a pat on her head when she ate vegetables she didn’t like, or played hide and seek with her, she may have understood with her senses that the adults living with her were her allies.

She didn’t trust me enough yet to let me sleep by her side, but I was hoping that we could slowly build a relationship of trust in the future.

Then,

“Got it? Is it okay?”

“It’s a little low.”

When I was cleaning my room, I found a digital height meter and tried to use it.

The beeping sound I just heard was to let me know that I had finished measuring.

The digital height meter was cute in the shape of a rabbit, and painted in pink.

Saki-chan’s eyes lit up when she saw it.

Apparently, she liked pink.

“Can I use it?”

“Yes. I’m going to measure you, and you’re going to stand against the wall.”

“Okay.”

I put the digital height’s meter on Saki’s head with her back against the wall.

“If it shakes, I can’t get a good reading, so don’t move.”

“Okay.”

This digital height meter was so good that if you put it on your head, the speaker sensor would respond and measure you based on the distance from the floor.

Since we were going to do this, I decided to measure mine and Saki’s heights.

Then,

“Oh, it’s done.”

“Did you get it?”

“Eighty-nine, so it’s a little low.”

“Uh-huh.”

According to my phone, the average height of girls who were about 1 and 2 years old was 92, which meant that Saki was a bit short.

“You’ll grow up.”

“I want to be a big girl soon.”

“You want to grow up fast? Then you’ll have to eat a lot.”

“Alright.”

When I gently pat her head, Saki-chan, who had been looking a little frustrated, squinted her eyes as if she felt good.

It’s not that she’s too short, and I didn’t think she needed to worry about it, but I didn’t want to say anything unnecessary to a kid who wanted to grow up.

If Saki-chan wanted to grow up, I, who was by her side, would only support her in that.

After this, I looked up the average height of 20-year-old women on my phone and found that it was a little over 158, so I knew that Mika was a little shorter than that, by three centimetres.

So, what was the point of this? I didn’t know.

“What should we have for dinner?”

“I want to grow up.”

“Hmm, so you want a good balance of nutrition? Meat, fish, vegetables, milk… and then…”

I was desperately trying to come up with a menu for the evening, but the person who was the cause of my troubles was tilting her head.

Saki-chan probably had no idea what nutrition was, so it was only natural that she would be confused.

I wondered what kind of menu I should prepare for my child to increase their height.

So I looked it up on my phone, and all I found were pages of supplements that I didn’t know. They seemed dubious and I pondered whether it was true or not.

I had a lot of respect for moms all over the country when I thought about how they carefully selected information from various sources, from these things to other things.

(It’s not easy being a mother.)

I was as quiet as I could be, but at night, after Saki-chan had gone to bed, I moved to the bathroom without making a sound.

An old colleague of mine once told me that sometimes children were awake when you thought they were asleep, so I had to hurry.

It was strange that I could remember conversations from my previous life, but the faces of my friends and others were blurred.

And I won’t say what, but when I measured some things with a measuring tape, they were size F.

“No wonder my shoulders were stiff…”

Saki wanted to be big, but she wanted to be small in a different way.

Because it was in the way.

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