"The light of a hundred stars cannot equal the light of the moon."

I've always loved the moon- it pulls me.
The kids saw a movie yesterday- Brave- where someone sweeps all the extra stars up into a crescent moon.
I married a man from Ksar Hellal-the castle of the crescent moon- sounds romantic, doesn't it? Reality, of course, is rather different. When he first took me to Tunisia, he talked the guards into letting us into the ruins of ancient Carthage after dark. As we walked in, the moon was just rising, bathing the fallen columns in silver. We had five enchanted minutes before the guard turned on all the lights.
As a child I watched the golden moon paint our lake gold, then silver as it rose higher. Sometimes we swam out the path it made for us.
It became Leila's dream to see the moon rise like this, spurred partly by her obsession with mermaids. My parents fulfilled this on an RV trip this summer, parking one night by a lake where the clouds held back long enough for her to experience the magic. (I warned her not to go swimming, though, as I didn't want her sprouting a tail everytime she gets wet, a la H2O.)
I had wanted to give her the middle name of Lua, but H wouldn't go with that. Instead, she's named for wisdom.