A Pencil...

Hello friends!

I know I've been MIA for awhile, and I promise to try not to drop off the face of the earth for so long in between posts. Anyway, I have a whole bunch of stuff in store, and I thought I would start with my favorite Gabbi story from this past December.

First, I need to give props to my friend Julie Veith over at You Know You're A Mommy When... She recently posted about understanding her son's gibberish, which totally reminded me about this story. (By the way, her son and Micah are only a week apart, and for awhile they looked a lot alike. Which means her son is totally, completely adorable.)

It was early December and Christmas was coming up, so I asked Gabbi what she wanted.

"A pencil."

"Really?!? A pencil? Do you want one like this?" I held up a number 2 pencil to show her.

"No." (As she looks at me with slanting eyes.)

I let it go for awhile. I figured that it was just one of those random things that she wanted spur of the moment. Surely she would give me a better gift idea next week.

Nope.

I asked her again. I had both grandmothers ask her. The answer remained the same.

"I want a pencil for Christmas."

So, I had planned on getting her a pack of pencils. The kids are overwhelmed with gifts from their grandparents, so we keep Christmas morning pretty low key in our house. I thought I would throw in a few other art supplies for good measure, but I was pretty sure that she would be happy with the pencils. That is, until I got the Christmas wish list from Gabbi's preschool.

Her teachers asked each student what gift they would like to give baby Jesus, and what gift they would like themselves. Gabbi wanted to give Jesus some frankincense. (No surprise there, Lou had been going over the Christmas story with her since the mall had put up its Christmas display, so that had been drilled into her head for months.) And what would Gabbi like?

"Barbie."

Barbie?!? How does she even know who Barbie is? We don't have any Barbie dolls in our house. We don't even have cable, so I know she didn't see it on a commercial. (BTW, one of the only benefits of a cable free home, other then not having to pay for cable, is that there are very, very few kids' commercials when you only have 9 channels. My kids have little to no idea what the latest toy/cereal/kid craze is.)

I was perplexed. I decided that we needed to have a little chat on the way home. It went something like this:

Me: "Gabbi, what do you want for Christmas?"

Gabbi: "A pencil."

Me: "Oh. I read on your paper from school that you wanted Barbie."

Gabbi: "Yeah, Barbie."

Me: "Do you even know who Barbie is?"

Gabbi: "Barbie is a pencil."

That's when it hit me. Not a pencil. Rapunzel. Holy smokers. She just couldn't say it correctly. Tangled had just come out and there were ads everywhere and I kept talking about how I would take her to see it. Rapunzel. I kept imagining her face on Christmas morning when she got to her "big present" and found a packet of pencils.

That would have been a shame.