Swirling vortex of adulthood

I had a portfolio conference with Laura in her class the other day—this was a first. Instead of having an appointment with the teacher, I met with Laura, who explained her writing portfolio to me. She had a pile of stuff in there—vocabulary quizzes, adverb exercises and the like, but the most fun stuff were her essays and poems. I’d seen most of the poems before, but she had a couple of essays I hadn’t seen, and one was a hoot.

The prompt for the writing assignment was “What would happen if you woke up and were a grown up?” I hope to get a copy of her essay later, and if I do, I’ll post it here, but for now, a quick summary. Laura discovered she was grown up when she woke up that morning and found all her stuffed animals were missing from her bed—when she looked for them in her cubbies in the closet, all her toys had turned into files! She called the doctor who came over, scanned her DNA, declared her officially grown, and advised her to get a job so she could pay her taxes (and she wrote this back in September or October, well before I started moaning about filing income taxes). So she found a job at Best Buy working in the cd section (her dream job?), but fortunately got up the next morning to find a swirling vortex in her closet, that when she walked through it, restored her to childhood and brought back her toys.

The really funny part was the end: “PS. Thank goodness I didn’t have a husband.” Chris felt rather affronted by this part of the story when I relayed it. Anyhow, I guess this just goes to show the value of watching Star Trek to encourage the imagination.