Parenting, particularly motherhood, is cyclical. When your children are infants, you are THE most important person in the world to them. Understandable, since they associate you with food, safety, warmth, and all that other good stuff. As they get older, you begin to move into a more, shall we say, minor role. They still love you and all, but at some point they figure out that you are not the be-all and end-all of the universe. And then, of course, you move even further away from the blinding center of coolness, and become Just Mom.
But periodically you can remind them that yes, while Just Mom, you are pretty darn good in your own right. With Peter I can do this by asking him how many other Moms can throw a spiral, teach him to field a double play, and shoot a hook shot.
My momen of glory with Grace came last night at Peter's basketball practice. Yesterday was her library day at school, and she came home with two books, one on constellations, and one on Understanding the World Wide Web (I kid you not...).
She thought she'd be cute and show off how much she knew, so she started quizzing me:
Grace: "Mom, what does W W W mean?" (as she hides the title of the book)
Me: "world wide web" (shock and amazement from Grace)
Me: "Grace, you do know what I do at work, right?"
Grace: "Well, yeah....."
Furious flipping of pages as she tries to stump me.....
Grace: "OK, fill in the blank. 'Some web pages have lots of pictures, or graphics. Others don't, and may use a type of computer code called ____________"
Me: "HTML" (more shock and amazement)
Me: "And it stands for Hyptertext Markup Language" (major shock and amazement)
More flipping of pages......
Grace: "Web pages have 'addresses' made up of words and letters..."
Me: "A URL" (OK, I was showing off at this point, but it worked!)
By the time we made it through the end of the book, I had answered a couple of other questions involving HTTP and tags, and Grace and I even talked about well-formed HTML tags. By the end of it, her comment was "Wow, you really know this stuff!"
It's good to be cool!
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