The world according to a nine-year old

Yesterday, I began my summer work as a nanny for two children; a boy, age six, entering the first grade, and his older sister, age nine, who is going to be a fourth grader. This little boy, whose name is Ian, is adorable in every possible way. His little face is almost always alight with mischief, but he's not naughty like some kids. This child has a little heart of gold, but he loves being silly and sneaky just the same. He notices everything too, but rarely mentions the things he notices until later, when he brings them up once it becomes pertinent; at which point you realize he's been listening WAYYY more carefully than you knew and that you'd better be careful what you say from now on.

His elder sister, Anne-Claire is completely opposite in how she operates. She's equally, if not more, observant and acute than her younger brother, but ohhh-hooo, she makes it known. She comments on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. Things like, the ring I'm wearing, that phrase I say all the time, and the angle at which my car is parked. (The last of which is the most frustrating/embarrassing). She lives for gossip, and to talk. To everyone. About everything. She'll talk your ear off within the first hour, and she's only just begun. But, even with her loud mouth, I love this child. She's so crazy, but she minds her boundaries when you set them. She tries to toe the line sometimes, just to see how far she can get, but once you tell her a definitive 'no' with a slight scowl she puts her hands up in surrender and tip-toes back slowly, so's not to get in serious trouble.

This afternoon, I read some of Anne-Claire's little stories she's written, and I came across some funny words and phrases. First, I encountered a dialogue in which one character says, "wheatever". This made me chuckle to myself. Then, I stumbled across "London [character name] always..." but Anne-Claire's 'L' looked slightly like a 'C' to me and so I read the beginning of the sentence as "Condom always..." I nearly choked on the strawberry in my mouth.

Then later today, Anne-Claire had a swim meet I had to take her to and get her settled before her parents came from work to watch. We get in this incredibly long line to get her swimming assignments, and we wait. And wait. And about fifteen minutes later, one of the swim moms finally walks down the line telling everyone that the assignments are posted over by the snack bar, if you can read the line notation. [Margaret Ann, naturally, knows nothing about line notation. She swam on a swim team for one pathetic summer, the result of parental intervention. She was fourteen, had had plenty of swim lessons, but never had swum for the sake of speed in her life. She was beyond terrible. One meet ended in a crying spell, after which she refused to get in the pool at meets for the remainder of the summer. Let's just say in summary that this was a dark time, and that it remains permanently blocked in her memory.]

Anyway, Anne-Claire pulls on my shirt and says, "Let's go!", to which I replied, "You know how to read those sheets?" And she says yes. So we leave the line, and go over to the crowd in front of the snack bar. Anne-Claire then realizes we don't have a sharpie to write her events down, so I scurry back over to our table on the other side of the pool and pull one out of my backpack. I get back to the throng, we wait until we get closer, and I then I finally lift her up to read the sheet, handing her the sharpie. She takes one good look at it, turns her head around to me, and announces ashamedly that she doesn't know how to read it. I sigh, return her to the concrete, pocketing my sharpie, and we walk back over to the end of the long line to stand in defeat with the other moms with five-year-olds who have no idea what's going on. And we wait.

Anne-Claire's warm-up time starts eventually, and so she leaves me in line to go get in the pool. I finally manage to get up to the table at the front of the line, and when I give the woman her last name, I am kindly asked if I am Anne-Claire. Umm, adult fail. "No," I politely tell her with a forced smile, "I'm just the nanny. She's in warm-up. Could you write down her events on my hand for her?"
At that moment, Anne-Claire pops up next to me, sopping wet, and wiping the chlorine from her eyes. She holds out her hand to the woman, but the mom tells her, "I need dry hands, dear." So, brilliant little nine-year-old that she is, Anne-Claire turns back to me and wipes her arms slovenly all over the front of my shirt, then serenely replaces her hand on the table. The woman tries to write on it, but it's still quite damp and the pen isn't working. In the end, I offered up my hand again instead, and got an odd-looking chart for a tattoo on the back of my palm. Finally we go back, dry Anne-Claire off properly, and copy the notes onto her hand.

Wow, God is teaching me patience today.

As I sit here typing this, I glance back down at my left hand. Even after scrubbing it with soap for ten minutes, it still looks like someone was scoring bridge and ran out of paper. I laugh.