And Now For Something Completely Different

Blech. Was that depressing, or what? Sheesh, if I weren't depressed before, I would be after reading that. So let's lighten things up a bit, shall we?

Things are a bit sunnier here today, in the metaphorical sense, and I realized that I hadn't shared with y'all one of the funniest things that's happened lately.

Punkin, not surprisingly (to me anyway), has turned out to be pretty smart. She is doing really, really well academically in school -- and behaviorally too, but that's another update for another day.

Periodically the teachers give the students benchmark tests. For kindergarten, the students are required to draw a little picture and then write a sentence about it. Punkin has been working on sight words since the beginning of September and I've seen her attempts at spelling come home on other projects -- "rabit" for "rabbit" and "ruod" for "road" -- both pretty excellent attempts I thought.

So, when we got her report card it included her benchmark test. Her picture was a self-portrait with a frowny-face, though more sad than angry. There was something smudgy next to her, but I couldn't tell what it was since I was looking at a photocopy. Her sentence below it read "I had a bad daeee. I hurt my knee." Everything was spelled perfectly except for "day."

"Punkin," I exclaimed, "this is fantastic! You did such a good job writing your sentence! I'm so proud of you!! But I have a question. What's this smudgy thing here beside you?"

"Oh, that's my bike," she replied.

"Your bike?"

"Yeah, I was going to write 'I had a bad day because I fell off my bike and scraped my knee' but that was too many words. So I changed it."

That's one smart cookie.