Abigail...the beginning of our joy!

A few months into this child's life, I would say credulous things like: "This parenting charge is so easy I bet you I could do it twice, maybe three times more with my half my brain tied behind my back."

The day I introduced her to Classic Literature and Poetry, I little knew that I had created a dragon and now I have to keep feeding it books..and more books. Normal people read a book once, maybe twice...this one of mine reads a book....maybe seven times and threatens to read it again on tape. She discovered that an i-pod does magical things like play and carry lots of audio books and now the book devouring dragon tis' two-headed.

If I had to describe our Abigail, what should I say? ...competent. She is the kind of child pregnant mothers dream about, a child who will sleep through the night, take five naps, do everything you ask, ask for more homework, you give her one page she does five and is always lugging around a flashlight and a Kipling, a Grahame or a Shakespeare.

When I made her take up typing to get her out of my hair, she took it seriously and made my flimsy 50 wpm not so impressive anymore. I used to aspire to play the piano until she started to play it, then I found out that playing and aspiring to are two different things. You, dear child, play beautifully and sing beautifully and so sing unto the Lord and play skillfully with a loud noise! (Psalm 33:3) She loves poetry...lots of it and remembers entire poems. I asked her and the others to memorize maybe a four line poem, and she did me one better: She memorized James Whitcomb Riley's When the Frost is on the Punkin' and the fodder's in the shock...

Sometimes I ask her to keep an eye on her little brothers and she gladly will...as long as I hide all the books in the house-unfortunately all the king's men and all the kings horses couldn't retrieve all the books lurking in, under, besides and wedged in the corners of her bed. Abigail loves The Lord and He loves her more. She is making her way through the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew bible and is reading the Christian bible over, yet again.  Here's the world according to Abigail:

• Trees are magnificent things under which one sits to read a book.
• The coat closet is a good place to hide from your little brother and read some more books.
• When PBS says "read to your child for 15 minutes a day" She is horrified to find out that they really mean 15 minutes, not 3-5 hours a  day.
• She loves nature, as long as you leave the flowers on the tree where they belong. For if your name is Anna, and you bring them inside (which you will anyway) and put them in a vase, with water, they might tip over onto one of my books...hence the utility of the coat closet where there is not enough room for a book, flashlight and flower vase!... Or unless the nature is a chicken or a goat, then we might even bring it inside the house and put it on the couch for tea and crumpets.

Our Abigail is hardworking, smart, humble and and conscientious. She was named her father's joy who became her mother's rest...Understood Abigail?