Several milestones for Madison

This is the week wherein Madison

a) Discovered the telephone. She is working on a writing project with her friend Reagan and has been writing with her while they talk on the phone about the project, several times each day.

Sigh. As if the bra last month weren't enough, now she's in the Phone Phase which I assume will last, oh, all her life.

b) Got new glasses. She had had the same purple wire frames for two years, BJ's frames. She had endlessly fiddled with them to the extent that they became crooked and it made her a little odd to look at -- it wasn't significantly crooked so you'd notice directly that something was amiss, but it would give her a slightly goofy cast to her face, and you'd almost unconsciously wonder whether her expression was a little off. Well, she had been complaining that her visual acuity had decreased, so I finally got her to the eye doctor on Monday. Her left eye has caught up with her right eye in terms of how fast it's declining; she's -2.5 in her left eye and -2.75 in her right eye. Sigh. Anyway, it was a good opportunity to get her new glasses, and you can bet that I steered her to plastic frames that can't be bent instead of wire frames that can. She looks pretty cool.

"Wow, you've got J-Lo frames," said the optometrist's assistant when we picked them up yesterday.

Madison looked at her blankly.

"Jennifer Lopez," the woman tried again. Still nothing from Madison.

"She's a famous singer," the woman explained. "She has a line of eyewear like what she wears."

"Oh," said Madison.

c) Discovered that she's going to come with me to the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference in Jackson Hole, WY in late June. Madison is thrilled. The conference has a special price for writing teens who accompany their writing parents; I wrote to them explaining that I had a rising 6th-grader who takes her writing seriously and would like to attend. Here was their note back:

We'd be happy to have your 11-year-old come on the Parent/Teen registration. I wish I'd had the opportunity when I was her age. I think she'll have a great time, being treated as an equal and a professional be other writers. It will make our conference better too. We'll have a couple of students below 15. I'm not sure if there will be any others as young as 11. But, if she takes her writing seriously, she'll learn a lot.
Write if you have more questions.

It was a "yippee" moment. I need to visit with my web site designers in Montana at the beginning of the summer anyway, so we'll fly into Montana on Monday June 21, drive down through Yellowstone to Jackson Hole on the 23rd, and be at the conference for Thursday-Sunday and fly back home from Montana on Monday. A week for just the two of us! I can't wait.

Well, I MUST wait, and that's a good thing, because it means that Food Fights must be complete by June 24th. It will be, I swear it. Just let me get this site launched and I can work on it like hell in May and June. It's written in my head already, just need the last 2/3 of it down on paper.