“Perfect”

“What are you weighing?”
“No!”
That is my niece’s favorite word, “no”. She is about to start her third year of life. I stayed the night at my parents’ place after a gig near my hometown. I skipped church the next morning and went for a long run. When I got out of the shower, my parents had returned from church with the duties of watching my niece and nephew for a few hours.
Boom, boom, boom! “Come on, Hannah!” I was toweling off and my niece was pounding on the door. I quickly threw on some clothes and opened the door to give a welcome tickle. I needed to do some laundry, so Katy followed me to the washing machine where she helped me chuck my stinky running clothes into the tub. I showed her how to push the buttons. We giggled. “Hair, wet.”
Yes, I need to dry my hair.
Kathryn and I went back upstairs where I pulled out a hairdryer. I noticed her stand on the digital scale in the bathroom. So I asked “What are you weighing?” to which Kathryn replied “no!” She watched me dry my hair in the way that a curious almost-three-year-old girl does. It was then that I started to wonder how much all of this stuff was teaching her about what it is to be a female in this world.
I wiped my face with some stringent.
“What’s that?”
“It helps take away some dirt”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a moisturizer for dry skin. You know how your face can dry in the winter?”
“Uh..yeah.”
I started to spray my hair with a little hairspray and she said “spray hair.”
“Yeah, a little bit. Your mom sprays your hair a bit for fly-aways. But you don’t need more. Your hair is perfect.”
I sprayed a little here and there. Pretending I was going to spray her and we giggled some more.
I paused and put away the spray.
“Well, it doesn’t matter we look like. Good enough, right?”
She looked away shyly and whispered “perfect.”