willow

I kept an ear tuned to the backseat as we drove.. happy to listen to the smart, witty, insightful musings of my eldest:

"Mom, how much longer till I"m a teenager?"

??!!

"How do you know which pedals to push and when? Do they teach you that in driving school?"
"When I'm in driving school I want a woman teacher."

"Mom, I think from now on you should start buying things instead of renting them."

?

"Like cd's, dvd's, movies, books, you know; that stuff. So you don't have to give them back. Cuz, you forget most of the time. So it would be smarter to buy the stuff."

I think about Charlotte's Web 2, and the letter I received from the video store..after several months..and I have the nagging suspicion that it would be cheaper to buy the DVD than to return it at this point..

I thank her for the unsolicited(heartily deserved) input, and agree to consider her suggested course of action.

"Mom, Abby has the Robert Frost poem-book. Stopping By
Snowy Woods? And I read the whole thing to her. By myself."

I smile for a long time. She's about to turn seven, and I know in a year she'll be astounding me even more, though it's hard to imagine. I wish everyone had a Willow.