Oh, Beanie. If only.

All Marley wants to do is hold Rudy's hand. All the time. She's forever reaching for it and being denied and then leaning in farther and getting Rudy all agitated and then grabbing desperately, and then Rudy totally shrieks and takes a swing and it's all downhill from there. I tell Marley she's like Wall-E. She tells me she loves Rudy's hand because it's little, and she loves holding it most when it's cold.

Todd met me at Bean's preschool Halloween party last week to keep Rudy busy while I helped to escort the parade of slow and shy trick-or-treaters around the high school. I was, once again, DJ Lance Rock, and I took special pride in waving joyfully at a couple of younger siblings at pick-up who were staring at me slack-jawed, either awestruck or totally rethinking the constancy of gender and race.

Rudy spent her morning amused by the vast collection of baby dolls and their accoutrements in between the play kitchen and the dress-up cubbies. And then she and Todd hung out in the reading corner while the class was gone. But when we got back and the class was dancing to "The Monster Mash" and "The Chicken Dance," Rudy waddled over with a baby doll, sidled up to her sister, and bounced alongside her with a huge smile. At this point, Todd had left and we were clearly hangers-on, but it was only another twenty minutes until pick-up anyhow, and Marley's teachers didn't mind having a Toot around. As Rudy would say, "Dude. Come on." ["Dooo. Uh-maw!"]

But here's the thing. We went outside to spend about fifteen minutes on the playground, and Rudy was totally compliant in the hand-holding. They strolled out there together and the teachers and other moms were all, "That is adorable," and I was all, "This never happens," frantically filming and snapping pictures of the seventeen-second walk because I knew even though she was holding it together, one of Marley's big sister dreams was coming true.

And, mostly, I think, unrelated, are the conversations Big Sister Marley and I had last week after someone actually robbed a bank in our town, wearing a scary Halloween mask and waving a gun before taking off so that Heather's neighborhood and the woods behind her home were combed by helicopters for about three hours. I know this because I was over watching Riley, and I kept peering out the windows at the manhunt.

To explain the helicopters and my frenzied hustle home from the bus stop, I explained to Marley that someone had stolen some money that didn't belong to him, and that the brave and smart policemen and policewomen would find him and punish him for breaking a law, which is a serious rule that everyone has to follow. And he would be punished by going to jail, which Marley knows all about since one of our neighbors is a prison guard. "And then Chris will be in charge of him?" she asked. "Sort of," I said. But the whole thing worried her, and I think it was one of the first times we were talking about grown-ups who do not have all their morals or marbles in order.

She asked why someone would steal, and I talked about how he must have felt like he wanted more money then he had and how he maybe thought this was a way he could get it since he never really learned good behavior. She wanted to know how he would eat in jail. And later on, after I thought we were done, she asked all quietly, "Mommy? When he's in jail, if he learns? Then can he get out?" Oh, man, right? I guess that must seem logical, if you're five. So I said that sometimes that's the way it works. But not always.

And then we spent the rest of that night coloring My Little Pony pictures. Sometimes my five-year-old seems like such a big kid who should know better when she's all tantruming about, for instance, Riley pushing the handicapped door button twice before she gets a chance to. And sometimes she seems so little and pipsqueaky and I just want to squeeze her. With love, of course, but also in a pretty tight clutch, so she can't away sneak a peek at any of the bad guys running around like there aren't any Beans or Toots in the world.