Happy Birthday, Dear Daughter!

In honor of our daughter's birthday today, I thought I'd tell a little story from when she was three years old.

We were living on 80 acres about a half hour out of town. It was the property to which we first moved here in Minnesota. A friend of ours had recently bought some land about a mile down the road from us and was building his own home there. On his way home from work in town one night, he stopped at our place to say hello. Roy and I were outside working on some project and our daughter was inside reading. Well, she couldn't actually read yet, but sometimes when she didn't want to be outside with us, she would gather a bunch of her books, climb up into her favorite chair, and announce she would rather stay inside to "read.”

After we chatted a few minutes with D, he asked if he might go inside to make an important phone call. This was before cell phones and his telephone hadn't been hooked up at his house yet. We said to go right ahead, that our three-year old was in the house, but he should say hello and tell her he came in to use the phone.

D went into the house and Roy and I continued with whatever we were working on outside. It must have been over fifteen minutes before D came back out of the house with a strange look on his face. We asked if his phone call went well. He replied that he never got through, the line was busy, and that he'd been talking with our daughter the whole time he was in the house.

He shook his head a bit and said, "And the scary thing is that it was the most intelligent conversation I've had all day."