I am confident that our babe can now survive in the wild. I don't know whether it's our station in India, her age, or my unnatural attachment to my laptop and smart phone; but Violet has acquired a few new survival skills worth mentioning...
Take this sample email I got while sitting in a meeting at work (while her father was also at campus).
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| Violet's morning ritual: emailing her grandmother and cousin and video chatting with her California friends |
Subject: Oh No!!!!!!
Mommy,
Saraswathi has not come................
Boooga
Violet was distressed that our cook had not come by 11 in the morning, so what did she do? She pulled out her dad's computer, entered his password, logged into his gmail account, and sent me this note.
Here are a few other classics that I hope she won't mind me sharing for posterity...
Subject: hi hi in the sky
Dear Mommy,
This book is soooo exciting! So I'm just going to finish it and start an A to Z mystery. Anyways, it will make up for the TV I used to watch a lot. I swam already. Maybe Daddy and I can go for a coconut. See you at 7:30, Mommy. I miss you!
Love, Violet
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Mommy,
Today was the worst day of my life at camp. Because we were writing stories and we had to make it about a certain picture and Bidushi only wrote one sentence.
Then we graded each other. I was being honest. I gave Bidushi a 4 out of 10. Mine was a good story and deserved a 7 or a 6. But Bidushi gave me a 3!
Okay, here's the worst part of my day. We were painting and I accidentally knocked down a bottle of red paint on the floor and it went on the cupboard and on the wall and a little bit on my backpack.
Love, Violet
I think I must the luckiest 60-hour work week mom in the world to get notes like these between all-hands meetings and performance reviews.
But how anyone can possibly function in society on her own at 8 years old, you ask? People! She even knows how to text. Nick and I had a late dinner in a hotel in Kerala a few weeks ago, and she begged us to go back to the room to go to bed. We took her up to the room and then finished up our meal (over-protective parents, judge at your own risk). As we were heading back to the room, I noticed I had a text message. It said, "When will you be done with dinner?"
These two developments may be more pride-inducing than her first smile, her first steps, etc...If she can send me an email when she's at home or send me a text, she can care for herself. But the cake-topper is that she's begun building power point presentations and sending them to me. This I find a little more disturbing, but in a strange way, I suppose it comes with the territory when you have a mom like me. And I guess kids need to know their way around technology these days. Is it sick that I promised Violet that she can come to my office to deliver a presentation on her birthday?
