How Was Your Day?

Each night at dinner I ask each of our four girls how their day was. For three of them, its an exercise in parental coaching to get them to move beyond the one-word answer “good.” Why was it good? What happened today? Did you learn anything? Did anything interesting happen to you or someone else? C’mon little lady..give me something here.

For our girl A, eight years old, no such encouragement is needed. We all must steel ourselves for the outpouring that comes with the question. A blow by blow granular recounting of every second of the day. Most of the time it is a hodge-podge of random events, comments and experiences that require multiple questions to try to string together a bigger story of the day.

Today’s was particularly interesting. Here is my best shot at recounting word-for-word her update:

“Today was good. I took my RAA test- it’s for reading. I read a story called, um, I don’t remember what it was called. We read a story and then take a test to see what we remember. It was about a dog and a boy. And a man stole the dog from the boy and when the boy asked him what happened to the dog the man said a swarm of birds took him away. So the boy took the mans donkey and told him a swarm of birds took him away too, and then they laughed and they gave each other their animals back. And Ms Kretchmar got really angry because she wrote the message for the day on the board and it took her 10 minutes to write it and someone erased half of it. She said that if the person that did it didn’t tell than we would all miss recess. Then C (a boy) said he had to go to the bathroom and he had marker on his hands and had to wash it off so we all think he did it. And someone threw mulch at me.”

I finally had a chance to ask a clarifying question about her day at the end of the spewing but I didn’t know where to start. So I started at the last thing she said…”Someone threw mulch at you?”

“Yes. I was doing my work and then I felt mulch hit my head, and then I felt it in my hair and someone threw it at me.”

Oh. Interesting.






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