Five years ago, the thought of Michael and Elena Donnelly being successful and happy in their chosen careers, happily married, and even more happily parents, would have been utterly laughable. And now look at them. The author was successful once more, churning out books he would never even have considered writing a decade ago; the actress was now a cook, and owned a successful cafe-restaurant; and between them, they had created a sunny-tempered little girl who had just passed her first birthday without any mishaps at all. Michela was the apple of her parents' eyes - if she wasn't playing around Michael's desk, then she was "helping" Elena in the kitchen. She'd made their sometimes fractured lives complete, and oh, didn't it show. She was also very loud.

"DADA!"

There wasn't much that could drag Michael away from his office when he was busy writing, but the summons from his daughter was one of them. "MICA!" her father called back, not nearly as loud as the little girl, but with almost as much enthusiasm. He abandoned his manuscript and peeked around the corner to spy on her.

What he found was his beautiful baby girl, covered in chocolate and leaving handprints of the stuff as she went, toddling toward his office from the kitchen, waving a chocolate-covered wooden spoon in one hand. Obviously neither she nor Elena had been able to decide who was going to lick the spoon, so Michael won that toss.

"Oh, good grief!" he exclaimed upon spying the little chocolate disaster waiting to happen and rushed forward to scoop her up off the floor, as carefully as he could without getting covered in chocolate. "Elena!" he called, starting toward the kitchen, holding the little girl as far from his body as he could without risking dropping her. "Where is your mother and what is she doing?"

"Is she with you?" Elena called back, predictably enough from the kitchen. They'd been baking; that is, Elena had been baking, and Michela had been desperately trying to eat every ingredient before it went into the mixing bowl.

"She is now," he replied. "Can you tell me why she looks like she's been rolling in chocolate?" he asked further as he joined his wife in the kitchen with the child in question.

To be fair, Elena didn't look much better. She, however, did her damnedest to pull off looking absolutely innocent while wearing handprints of chocolate and flour all over her face, arms, and clothes. She laughed at the way he was holding their daughter. "She's not a bomb, Mischa," she reminded him through her giggles. "She wanted you to taste the cake mix."

He looked from the chocolate-covered woman to the miniature version, brows arching upwards in puzzlement. "Is that so?" he asked, with a murmured, "Hmm," as he seemed to think it over. "Well, I guess I can do that," he said, leaning closer as he attempted to lick the spoon their little daughter had hold of.

It was a testament to how fast Elena could clean these days that she was the only evidence of the state the kitchen had been in when Michela had gone walkabout with her spoon. As Michael leaned in to lick the spoon, however ....his darling daughter bonked it off his forehead, and let rip with an outrageous giggle that had her mother hastily turning away so the little mischief couldn't see her smile.

Michael blinked as he got bonked with the spoon, leaving a smudge of chocolate on his forehead, a smirk on his face. "I see a bath in someone's future," he teased the little girl, though she might not understand exactly what he was saying. "You do realize she left a trail to my office," he informed his wife.

"It's chocolate, it'll wipe off," Elena said with a shrug, her grin wide at Michela's cheerful act of vandalism on her own father's forehead. "At least it wasn't glue this time."

"That was a mess," Michael agreed, scowling at the memory of having to scrub glue not only from the floor and walls, but from Michela's hair. "Say buh-bye to Mummy. It's time for a bath!" he said, holding the baby toward her mother for a chocolatey kiss.

"Aren't you lucky, you get a bath!" Elena enthused, laughing as Michela stuck her tongue out at her. "Same to you, cheeky chops." She leaned in, accepting her sticky kiss without batting an eye. "I promise the cake is worth the mess," she added to Michael with a grin.

Michael chuckled, knowing he was going to end up just as soaked as Mica, though it was her who was having the bath. "It better be," he teased back, leaning close to lick the chocolate from his wife's lips, before turning to "fly" the one-year-old toward the bathroom, accompanied by an airplane sound.

As it was, the bath was pretty well timed. By the time Michael and his daughter were dry again, dinner was on the table, the cake was cooling on the counter, and Elena was as clean as she was going to get without a bath of her own. "Okay, messy, here's the plan," she said, strapping the baby girl into her high chair. "If you can get through this cup of risotto, then you get cake. How's that?"

"Do you really think she understands bargaining at her age?" Michael asked as he poured them each a glass of water before taking a seat at the table. They'd been over this particular question more than once and had never been able to come to an agreement.

"Never hurts to try," his wife grinned, dropping down into her seat to shovel the first spoon into Michela's mouth. Ever since the little girl had started on solids, she'd been getting quite an extensive education in tastes, thanks to her mother's skill in the kitchen.

"Not as good as chocolate cake," Michael muttered under his breath, but then, one couldn't live on chocolate cake alone. "Hmm," he murmured as he took up a forkful of risotto. "That gives me an idea."

"Another one?" Elena grinned around her own mouthful, pausing to encourage Mica to have another spoonful of her own. They were masters at this by now; no one had warned them that trying to eat your own dinner before it got cold when your child was still being spoon-fed was such a struggle, but they'd managed to work it out eventually. "How many books is that now?"

"Well, this one would be a bit different," he replied with a grin that matched her own before scooping up another forkful of risotto. There had been a time when he wouldn't have touched the stuff, but Elena had a gift for cooking. He failed to mention how the next book might be different, nor did he offer any hints.

"Very mysterious, Mister Writer Man," she teased him laughingly. "Isn't he, Mica" Very mysterious. Should we let him have cake if he's being so mysterious?" Michela watched Elena shaking her head for a moment, and copied the movement, obediently opening her mouth for more dinner. "There, see? Mica thinks you should be punished for being mysterious."

She burbled back at him. Mica only had a handful of discernible words right now, but she gabbled away in her own private version of the language whenever she was given the opportunity. Michael and Elena had learned to look absolutely fascinated during these long, rambling burbles, because otherwise their darling daughter sulked.

Michael nodded and murmured appropriately in response to the baby babble, as though he knew perfectly well what she was saying when nothing could be further from the truth. "Mmhmm. Oh, my! You don't say!" he interjected from time to time, as though they were carrying on a perfectly normal conversation.

As Michael chatted with his daughter, Elena tidied up. Her kitchen was the pride of her home, and she was meticulous in keeping it clean, even with a one year old around leaving a mess wherever she went. Thankfully, Michela was a very good sleeper - once she went down, she was out like a light for the next eight hours or more, which gave her parents time to reconnect and get a decent night's sleep together.

"So we've done a bath, and we've had dinner," she said as she rejoined them. "Is Papa reading to you tonight, munchkin?"

"I think tonight calls for something special," Michael replied for their daughter. No more listening to Papa's boring novel that didn't mean a thing to her but definitely put her to sleep. "And I have just the thing," he said, getting up from his chair and disappearing temporarily into his study before returning with a small pile of picture books.

"Do you think Papa's been writing more just for you?" Elena asked the sleepy girl with a smile. "Or maybe he's found something extra special just for you." She didn't get much of an answer - dinner was always guaranteed to turn their daughter into a sleepy little robot.

He was only gone a few minutes, but when he finally returned, he produced a handful of small, colorful picture books with silly titles like "Mr. Chatterbox" and "Mr. Jelly", and so on, and featured a silly but colorful drawing of the title character on the cover. "Surprise!" he declared, as he presented both mother and daughter with a handful of brand new reading material.

"Look, Mica! Brand new books, just for you!" Despite her sleepiness, the baby girl clapped her hands excitedly. She was definitely her father's daughter when it came to books; being read to at night was easily one of her favorite things in the world, so long as it was Michael doing the reading. Apparently Elena just didn't do it right.

It was a nighttime ritual enjoyed by both father and daughter, and one that hopefully didn't make mother too envious. There would come a time in the not too distant future when the tables might be turned, but for now, Michael was happy to do the bedtime reading. He didn't just read the words either, but did voices and put so much feeling into the story that just hearing him read was entertaining in itself.

It certainly entertained both his girls. Elena laughed more at the jokes in the short texts; Michela was delighted with the bright, simple pictures and her father's exaggerated versions of the voices. It only took three books to make her yawn, though, snuggling down against Michael's chest to suck her thumb as she blinked owlishly at the fourth book in his hands. Elena smiled gently; bedtime was almost here.

Michael took that snuggling as his cue to tone his reading down, choosing a book called "Mr. Lazy" for his final bedtime tale. He'd hardly gotten through half the story before little Mica lost the battle against sleep and her eyelids drifted closed for the last time and didn't reopen. "Time for bed," he whispered, touching a kiss to his daughter's head as he carefully moved to his feet.

Across the room, Elena looked up from her own reading, lowering her glasses from her nose as she smiled at her husband. "Coffee?" she murmured, careful not to speak too loud in case Mica jerked awake. They'd done that a few times, too.

He nodded in her direction, whispering back, "Decaf." Even parents needed to sleep sometime, and he didn't want the caffeine to keep him awake too long. He disappeared from view then, tiptoeing into the nursery to lay the baby girl down for the night.

As Michael bore Michela upstairs to lay her down, Elena moved back into the kitchen, brewing a small pot of decaf coffee for them both. She didn't quite see the point of decaf coffee, but had swallowed her objections and grown used to making the stuff for Michael at the end of the day. When he returned, she curled up on the couch with him. "You know that chapter you asked me to read?"

It was pretty simple, really - regular coffee was for when he needed to either wake up or stay awake, usually when his muse was on fire, while decaf was for when he just wanted to enjoy the taste of coffee without the added kick. He'd tried explaining that to her before, but she never quite seemed to get it. "Which chapter?" he asked as he wrapped one arm around her, while sipping decaf coffee.

"The one with all the exposition in it," she clarified. "You wanted me to read it over and make sure it made sense, and since I haven't read any of the rest of the manuscript, I'm fresh eyes?"

"You can read the rest of it, if you like. The publisher is going over the final draft. God, I hope they don't want me to make any more changes," he added with a sigh. Writing was easy; it was the editing he hated.

"Well, you know I'm going to read it when you get your copies from the print," she chuckled. "No, I wanted to point something out ....About four paragraphs in, the voice changes. Is that because the character has stopped speaking and you've switched back to narrative, or is it because another character has picked up the story' Either way, it's not very clear."

"Hmm, I'm not sure. I'll have to take a look later, but thanks for pointing it out." Elena had always been his biggest fan and his best critic. She knew how to find inconsistencies in his story and tell him about them without damaging his confidence. "I wonder why the editor didn't mention it."

"Well, it is a lot of information in one go," she chuckled. "Necessary, but a lot in one go. And I'm used to reading in the voices of your characters. I might have missed something that makes it obvious, but I thought I should point it out, just in case."

"I'll take a look," he assured her again, but he wasn't going to do it now. He'd learned not to let his writing interfere too much with his personal and family life, but it had taken a lot of effort to reach that point.

"Okay." It had taken a while for her to be confident enough to criticize his writing, when he allowed her to read it, but finally Elena had struck the happy balance between encouraging and gently constructive. "I was going to take Mica swimming tomorrow," she commented then, leaving the subject before he could start to brood. "Want to come" It's hilarious."

"Swimming?" he echoed, looking a little shocked. "She only just learned how to walk a little while ago." Though he'd never admitted it out loud, they both knew he wasn't the most adventurous spirit, but he didn't want Mica or Elena to suffer for it.