Report Card

My daughter attended her first parent-teacher conference today with her little girl's kindergarten teacher. She arrived home with a neatly printed assessment of her daughter's potential and achievement (a report card to us old timers). Not surprisingly, most of the marks showed she was above average and thoroughly enjoying school. However, one criteria caused the teacher to point out that she could certainly use some improvement in "talking too much". My daughter was much concerned. I figured that she is a product of her genes. After all her grandmother had this note on all her report cards from kindergarten on. I'm sure if there had been a place to report it in college I would have gotten it there, too. I once had a colleague comment that she had never known anyone who loved words more than I did. I guess that's a nice way of saying I never outgrew "talking too much"!

This little girl is definitely a chip off the old block. When she was just a baby she would babble on indefinitely. The difference from her babbling and others is that she managed to babble in paragraphs with complete punctuation. You actually felt like you were listening to a long story in some foreign language. My daughter swore she was talking in Chinese. Of course, she was surrounded by family that loved to tell a good story and did so on the drop of a hat. Soon she was following suit, rattling off long sentences of blab and gooble, often punctuated with pauses, emphasis, and exclamations. Then she would end the story by slapping her knee and laughing to beat the band. Don't tell me she wasn't sharing a really good, funny story!

Her parents have never talked down to their children, explaining complicated ideas carefully and simply. This has caused her to recognize and use unusual words for small children. We once overheard her using the term "populations". This one threw us since we couldn't figure out what she was referring to. Then her daddy explained that it was a term he used in talking about the amount of seed that you use to plant a corn field. Shows that sometimes grandparents aren't as smart as they think they are.

She was somewhere between two and three when she astounded my hubby and I when she interrupted a discussion we were having by announcing that we needed to "compromise". He turned to her in amazement and asked, "Just what do you mean by that". She looked him straight in the eye and said, "It means that you have to give a little and grandma has to give a little".

I think we could use her in Washington.