It is no secret that my youngest child is going to be the death of me. Do not let her deceptively sweet and cherubic good looks fool you. This child is an evil mastermind. And somehow, SOMEHOW, she can con your pants off and leave you laughing at the same time. It's an art, really. A skill. And something, that no matter how hard I try, you just can't stay mad at. She's infectious.
The events of yesterday morning unfolded like most any other day before school. I was sorting through her little folder (kindergartners have soooo much stuff coming home), recycling papers and double checking homework. It was then I stumbled upon the reading log.
A reading log that gets filled out and signed by a parent daily.
A reading log that looked terribly amiss.
"Baby...one
of these things does not look like the rest. You will need to rethink any
future career in forgery."
This normally inquisitive child, a child who takes every opportunity to ask what something means (to expand her vocabulary and my pride for her intellectual thirst) never even bothered to look up at me or ask what forgery meant.
"I didn't do that, you did..."
Come again? I stared in shocked disbelief that my sweet little five-year-old just lied to my face, with absolutely zero remorse. It took me a moment to gather myself and compute the exchange taking place. "Was I drunk?"
"No, but you do have bad writing sometimes..."
Wow. Ballsy. And then I remind myself that she IS a chip off the old block, and I was proficient in forging parental signatures by sophomore year of high school, not only for myself, but for friends to accompany me on my joy rides as well. In that moment, she looked up from her practice writing and giggled at me. And it was in that same moment that I thought to hide my checkbook and to master a much more complicated signature.
