A Moment of Praise

You know how people can just get singularly obsessive and boring over holiday photos.  Even if you haven’t experienced it you can imagine it, sitting on a settee whilst photo after photo is passed before your eyes and a story unfolds which, though you may try as hard as you can, you cannot be interested.  Well this post may be a bit like that, I am about to talk about how great my daughter is.  Just thought I should give you all fair warning.

My daughter is amazing.  I know that as her daddy I am not really entitled to pass judgement, after all, if it was up to me she would have been awarded a Nobel prize in some shape or form by now, if Barack Obama can win it after barely enough to draw breath in the Oval Office, why not N?

I’m biased is what I’m saying, and therefore my analysis in this area is not really to be trusted, however, she really is pretty awesome, despite the impression that you may have been given by reading what I have already written.  So let me try to redress the balance just a little with this, very short, but incredibly positive, post about my little girl.  Perhaps I’m going soft?

We read together quite a lot.  We have been incredibly blessed to have received many many children’s books from some very generous people.  I love books (which has led to some quarrels with my wife as I desperately and jealously try to guard the book shelf space that I have against incursions by other things.  I think I must have lost the battle when the exercise bike ended up in the study though.)  I really, really love books, which seems to have rubbed off onto N because she also really loves them.  Her attention span is sometimes not quite as long as mine, although Lord of the Rings was probably the wrong place to start her off, and so we do occasionally find ourselves, despite the one book off one book back rule, surrounded by a pile of discarded books as she tries to work her way through all the books one by one. 

At least I thought it was her attention span.  Until recently when I discovered that she could just be getting bored with the selection.  You see, we have a bit of a game with a particular set of books.  The Usborne Farmyard Tales books, (fabulous, entertaining, colourful, just right for our little girl.  It also turns out, I found out tonight, that you can follow the little yellow duck, who is hidden on every page of the books, on Twitter, brilliant.)  With these books, as we read I will pause as we come up to the people’s names at the beginning of the books, which all start the same, and N will fill in the blanks.  We do this because the first page is always the same and she really enjoys shouting the names, especially Rusty the dog.  It was only these books though, I had never even thought to try it with any of the others we read. 

But then, one evening last week, Nana came round.  Which was great as it took the pressure off me and she got to read N books all evening instead.  And suddenly, N was filling in all sorts of words for her.  Nana would get to the end of a line and leave off the last word which N would dutifully and fairly consistently supply.  Both my wife and I were stunned, which led to a round of testing to find out just how many books N had committed to memory, it turns out a fair chunk of the library is now stored securely in our little girl’s brain.  Incredible.  I’m sure it’s a fairly commonplace sort of a thing which is unlikely to garner international press attention, especially not during the Olympics, but it impressed me.

You see, clearly destined for great things, even if I do say so myself.  Now I will probably go back to writing about the infuriating, maddening, impossibly difficult things that she does to drive both me and my wife mad, but just for a little while it has been nice to be able to bore you all with how great my daughter is, perhaps you’d like to stick around?  I’m sure there are some holiday photos here somewhere I can talk to you about, there was this really great one of a caterpillar I just know you’d love.