"__MN"

I have to give my dear sister credit for this post. I so desperately wanted a topic other than politics and she handed this one to me on a silver platter.

I received a phone call around 3:00 pm this afternoon. Obviously, it was the above mentioned sister. She started to relay a story to me and asked if I remembered the coloring/activity pad belonging to my niece that has the lion on the cover. Off-handedly, I replied that I may not have seen it. "I think you have," she said.

"Oh, that's right," I corrected myself, "she had it at that '50s style restaurant we went to." It has been several months and it slipped my mind.

"We just pulled it out of the cabinet," she said, "and were going through it."

My niece, well on her way to six years old, has been putting sounds together and is in the beginning stages of reading. There was a page, my sister pointed out, that had the alphabet written out with letters missing at certain intervals. The reader was to fill these letters in.

Apparently, there were two spaces left out right before the letters M and N.




Now, let's be honest. What would you have written in the spaces?

It took me a second to realize what she was getting at, and to realize what Uncle Elgarf had, in fact, written. I had no stop-watch at the time, but am willing to bet that it was a good 60 seconds worth of gut wrenching laughter.

"Mommy," my niece said, "I think that spells something." Apparently my sister turned the page or jumped to the next set of letters to avoid a controversy. It took her some time to figure out who, in fact, filled in the missing letters. She was pretty sure it was not herself, knew it was not her husband, didn't think it was Grandma A or Grandma B. Then she came to me. Who else could it have been?

That's why I was laughing so hard.

Who would have thought?

I wrote a message in the activity book of a non-reader.

Less than a year later it could have been read.

I guess Uncle Elgarf will have to be more careful in the future.