No, the little girl in the shopping cart isn’t anyone I know. That’s just a photo I pulled off the web. There is a reason I posted it, though, and It’ll make sense in a while.
Our daughter, Cheryl, started talking at a ridiculously early age.
On the 4th of July after she was born on January 30th, we took a trip to San Antonio. As we rode the boat down the San Antonio river, Cheryl pointed at the flowers blooming along the riverbank (or at least waved her arm in that direction) and loudly said, “Look, Mama! Pretty!”
When they asked us, the people with us on the boat could not believe that she was just a few days over five months old. Actually, most people to whom I’ve told that story have looked at me like I was nuts.
It did happen, though – believe it or not.
I was an early talker, too. Nowhere near Cheryl’s league, but I was using full sentences before I was a year old. Later, I became the talk of the neighborhood when a neighbor asked my age and I replied “Two and a half.”
My mother told that story about a million times, so when Cheryl was approaching eighteen months of age, I taught her to say “one and a half” – probably just to piss my mother off.
One day, [Here’s where the picture comes in.] we were in the checkout line at K-Mart and Cheryl struck up a friendship with a little girl in the basket behind us. I turned to the girl and said something like, “Aren’t you a little cutie? How old are you?”
The kid held up two fingers and her mother said, “I guess I need to start teaching her to hold up three fingers. She has a birthday coming up next week.”
I nodded and smiled.
The lady then asked Cheryl how old she was, and she replied, “One and a half.”
The woman turned beet red and without a word grabbed her cart and stormed off for another checkout line.
She always was a smart one (probably gets it from her cousin.) (Oh, wait, that isn't a thing that's possible; maybe her cousin isn't so smart after all.)
ReplyDeleteThat's a very cute story.