The stroller isn’t meant for real babies. The model she’s taken to is a miniature one intended for baby dolls with small wheels to carry light loads around a living room or to be pushed up and down a sidewalk, gently – not to carry the enormous weight that results from her collecting sprees. She loads the seat and its undercarriage with stuffed animals, puzzle pieces, pinecones, marbles, synthetic flower stems with the blossoms cut or fallen off, potato chip bags, a backpack and a hippo figurine.

Her stroller goes with her everywhere: to the swimming pool, across the house’s three stories, to the bedroom when she falls to sleep. The neighborhood pool is a quarter mile away and she insists that it go with her though nothing in it is going to come in handy later or be valuable to her in any way. But she insists it go along by showing real concern and disappointment for it. She turns up her bottom lip and her eyes widen and turn damp, and she asks in her best Shirley Temple voice, “Ah, why can’t I take my stroh-lah?” And she says it just like that.

So the stroller is in for the trip. About 100 yards along the way, her father – I – am pushing it across the smooth blacktop past the beach houses and the tree shadows. It’s an easy push with a reward at the end. If it gets too hot, you can jump in the pool. But a few feet is all she can stand and then it’s my turn to fill in.

Her treasures are the innocent kind and so is her flightiness. But the junk she collects is insight into her mind.

She has no idea what is important. She has left everything up to her parents in shaping her life. Her concern lies in the little things. They are more important than where her parents live, what color the house is, what street it’s on, where her father sleeps, what school she goes to, who her neighbors are and all those real questions that adults concern themselves with.

My daughter – three years old – has slept with me the last two nights. She is consistently the most difficult one, the one that is often the toughest to fall asleep, so when she asks that I tickle her to sleep every night, I do it. Beginning with her back, she lays face down and pulls her nightgown up to her shoulder blades and tells me to tickle her. So I do. After a few minutes, she slips an arm around behind her and I tickle it, too. She shifts her head from side to side, moving it in the pillow softness and breathing softly. She opens one eye to me to see if my eyes are closed, if I am about to sleep, which of course I would be if wasn’t for her demands. And we smile. She knows. This happens in the nightlight’s orange glow.

Earlier in the day, she found some old glasses lying on the countertop and put them on. She looked so much like her mother. This beautiful girl, it reminded me, is part of two people. One face, depending on which parent’s perspective is taken, is now a disappointment to the other. In the beginning, when two people are in love, neither can do any wrong. In the ending, you can’t stand to see each other. When there are children, it’s no so easily resolved.

Here is what I know that my daughter doesn’t: The only way that value should be attributed to everything in life is if you live every day from that viewpoint … if you count everything as a blessing, completely wondorous about it’s value and impact on your life, no matter how miniscule it might seem to be. And here is what else I know that she doesn’t: her parents didn’t live that way, together.

My little girl collects random things because they are all beautiful to her, wherever she finds them, whatever condition they are in. She’ll live through this divorce. Her parents aren’t going to change in her eyes. They are like seashell-shaped soap, another priceless item for her collection.

The road was curvaceous and it towed the car along, the wheels hugged tight along the edges, at times passing over the center line and then back safely into its own lane. We drove past crumpled shacks with front doors that opened to the highway and expansive tobacco farm spreads and cider mills far off the road. She stopped talking and entrusted the driving to me and the truth was that I was lost. I had a general idea about where to go, but nothing more. We were going east toward the interstate, but there were no on or off ramps for miles, just narrow country road dug into the dirt.

Finally we came to an old race track that’d been shut down since the summer before and beyond it was a dead end road underneath the massive supports holding a bridge overpass above train tracks and soybean fields. On the shoulder, a man with hair that had been pulled by a motorcycle helmet and pink cheeks colored by the wind sat with his legs around his bike’s back wheel tooling with bolts near the rear shocks. He watched us turn around at a dead end, in the gravel, and pull by him again. He traced us most of the way down the street back to a turn we’d missed to the highway. He must have wondered how he could choose a work spot at a dead end on a nothing road and still be interrupted.

We followed the highway signs and were back on the interstate with the country hills and the winding curves below us. I was no longer driving blindly, and everything that came along was familiar and not as exciting. She never knew we were lost. She’d asked because she is intuitive, but she never knew for sure.

Left unto themselves, it’s a veritable Lord of the Flies here on a Saturday mornings with faint light streaming in windows brightening the winter-long dust and tiny hand prints left on the glass by children. They fill up literally every inch of the house during the winter time beginning from the time they wake up about 7 a.m., covering three levels with games of chase, wrestling, or with something less physical, the sound of carrying noise and blood-curdling screams. Most of the mischief breaks out about the time I come downstairs to write.

Fights typically involve a toy, usually a long-forgotten one that has temporarily gained one child’s attention, which then makes it the focus for the other two. Suddenly it becomes a centerpiece to be torn at and ripped from one another’s hands. This morning the object isn’t a toy at all, but a decidedly larger and fixed thing: a Dell computer that outweighs the children by in total body weight by 20-40 pounds. And yet the argue over it and who gets to play on www.StarFall.com, a pre-school-oriented web site that helps children learn to read and count through a series of fun stories and games. The children, all of them, have learned much from the site, either through the music or the helpful visual cues that draw them into the stories.

The problem is, it’s not so entertaining for parents, who more than likely know how to read if they have an operable computer system in the basement. Parents take their joy from the children’s learning while finding other tasks to focus their attention on — folding laundry, reading a book, etc. So the children, usually beginning with the eldest, fixate themselves around the pleather rolling chair and concentrate on the screen. At first, it’s an amiable learning environment where our five year-old, Annie, cycles through the games and the others offer little comment.

After awhile, though, the younger kids, Caroline and Charlie, begin to point things out, offer up their own solutions to the puzzles on screen and otherwise unsolicited advice. Even that is not too evasive, at first, but it persists and eventually the shared learning environment turns into outward hatred, a place where heads are rammed together, fingers twisted and fat baby cheeks pinched. Anger overcomes their faces in pursed lips, squinted eyes and wrinkled brows, and it begins with Annie’s sudden movement left or right, whichever direction the offender might be seated.

Our other children used to take it and be reduced to tears, but as of late they have learned to respond to these advances, biting and maiming in retaliation. I can’t say what makes them do it, other than cabin fever and Annie’s unrelenting will to “do it myself.” But invariably, regardless of the reason, I arrive too late, the momentary morning solitude shattered or at least spoiled and smudged like the row of windows along the front of the house.

Conversation is not a gift that three- and five-year-olds possess. After a few minutes, the talk dwindles and soft steps move toward the stairs. On most mornings, the pair comes down to the living room half-naked with footed fleece pajamas partially unzipped and their wet diapers flung out on their bedroom floor. This morning, the boy pulls a blanket three times his height down the stairs behind him. Draped around his head, he is the morning Wiseman rehearsing for a Christmas play. He has removed his pajama bottoms but not his shirt, and, upon reaching the living room, swaddles himself and his sister into a place on the couch.

Light has come to another day, the great triumph over dark that will gradually gives way to dark again. Children are oblivious to the sun and the moon battling in eternal tragedy, a fight that ends with one temporary victor at dusk and at dawn, but ultimately ends a draw. Something inside them, though, draws their bodies from sleep and to bed at the same hour of the day. Before the proprietors of other houses on the street have read fresh newspapers or brewed coffee, our children are awake.

These “strangers,” as they would dub them, do not yet realize it’s daylight. The house fronts are dark. The entire street is bathed in blue light. The only movement on the block is an idling front porch swing, but otherwise the wind is holding its breath. Flags dangle flaccidly from flag posts. Subtle layers of frost on car windows await the soft sunshine to turn them to beaded jewelry.

Outside the thin window glass bird song is drowned out by a train whistle, then the outdoor morning is returned to them. Singing from bare branches, seated in nests they built that withstood October gales and November rains. One glides above the stained glass window in the dining room – wings narrowed and level – shattering the painting of sky behind it. Gangs of finches swoop from bird feeder to bird feeder placed in the front yard bushes, until something sets them off, and lift together a few feet in the air, then return to their original places as nervous as they were and yet feeling as though they’d escaped something.

At 7:30, the children are already excited. Their mother comes downstairs and starts the coffee. She puts cinnamon rolls into the oven to bake while the children lift small spoons from cereal bowls at the dining room table. The light in the room is softened by stained glass, by the tree outside the window and the shadow cast by the rise of the house across the street. They dip their fingers into the frosting as their energy spreads through the house as fully as the oven even fills the kitchen with its heat. They were the first to rise and the first to push into the world another time.

Like the autumn’s last birds, our children sing the first song of the day.