Katie is 7 and a stellar graduate of the first grade. Her teacher said she was above average. Like Lake Wobegon, maybe all of the children are above average. To Diana and me, her doting grandparents, she is superlative in all of the good ways. She is our only grandchild and thus she sets the curve for fondness, affection, comeliness, literacy, intuitiveness, diligence, and brilliant promise for the future.
Those who find your way to the back of this journal regularly know that my occasional reports on the world’s most wonderful granddaughter are the only instances where I wax lyrical and hyperbolic. She is well worth my most florid adjectives.
A couple of years ago, Katie’s parents parted ways. They share joint custody. She spends four nights with her mother and three with her dad, and swings back and forth when one of them has to travel on work. The arrangement works fairly well so far and should continue unless one parent wants to move away. All we can do is hope that does not happen for a decade.
As best we can tell, her situation has contributed to her maturity. In our presence, at least, she does not carry tales about one parent to the other. Her questions to her grandmother indicate that she is trying to understand what happened to change their lives and hers. She has plenty of company with several classmates being children of divorce. I wonder if 7-year-olds talk with each other about such problems, or share the good and bad in their experiences.
One sign of Katie’s growth is her awareness of the schedules that control her days and nights. She had homework in the first grade and she usually did it without being nagged. She knows when bedtime comes. At mealtime, she often cleans her plate and no longer plays with the contents. She even has a sense of how to match up her clothing. At this point, most of her things are outgrown before they are worn out. Now she makes it known if last month’s favorite dress has somehow shrunk while hanging in the closet.
In my earlier paeans to Katie, I wrote about how I started reading to her as soon as she could hold up her head. Now, as I hoped and predicted, she read to me on our last trip to see her. She is not intimidated by words of more than two syllables. Her parents and her good teachers in kindergarten and the first grade taught her how to approach a big word, pull it apart, pronounce it and, if need be, ask what it means. She gets through Dr. Seuss in good style. Most of the books Diana selects for her are second- and third-grade fodder. Together one morning we read the headlines and some of the opening paragraphs in the local newspaper. The paper is not edited for 7-year-olds, but she worked her way through most of the stories.
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