about her

Catherine was the "Child of the Week" last week and she brought home her "About Me" construction paper Catherine and poster. Here is how she filled it out:

My name is: Catherine Quinn
My age is: 6
My favorite food is: ice cream
My favorite color is: pink
My favorite sport is: running
My favorite pet is: a cat
When I grow up I want to be: a teacher

No big surprises, there, especially since she is so enamored with school and her teacher. However, that is a little different from her pre-school days when her favorite food was bananas and she wanted to be a mother when she grew up. Pretty soon I'm afraid her favorite sport will be football.

It is an obsession that we have never embraced. We'll occasionally listen to the game on the radio while we're working outside or watch it on TV if it's being aired on one of the channels our antenna picks up. At school, though, it appears she is being indoctrinated. The second week of school she brought home a reading assignment to practice her first sight word, "a". One of the pictures was "a" football and she had no idea what it was. I thought it was funny as I imagined her classmates looking at her with their jaws on the floor thinking, "What planet did you come from?". Today, just one month later, she drew Saint Catherine in a field of flowers, a rabbit at her feet, a bird flying overhead, and three red footballs floating around her. Sigh.