Mutant gene

Edith received an easel for Christmas that we left in the box for awhile. We wanted to save some of the bounty for later, and since Edith has not yet been terribly into art, the easel seemed like a logical thing to wait on until she had developed more interest. But then several mothers mentioned to me that having an easel made all the difference in whether their kids were interested or not in doing art. So the other morning, during a lull, we set it up. Suddenly Edith was announcing, "I'm an artist."

The next thing she did was declare that she was going to draw circles. And bam!--she did. Over and over. This was particularly impressive to us because at our parent-teacher conference just last week, Edith's teacher showed us some of her drawings from school that looked like lots of random scribble and explained that she couldn't yet draw a circle but that she had been trying. And now here she was a few days later, doing it.

As I watched her practice her circles with a furrowed brow and attention to technique, I was forced to acknowledge a fact about my daughter that I haven't wanted to see. Tom has been gently nudging me toward the hard truth for a few months, but I've resisted admitting it to myself. But the circle art laid it bare in the starkest light, making further denial impossible:

It appears that Edith is right-handed.

I don't know how two healthy lefties like us could have produced a child with this unfortunate defect. We'll do everything we can for her at home, of course, but we're going to need to look into some external support services when it comes to teaching her baseball and golf. Maybe we'll see if one of her teachers can put in some extra time with her on shoe-tying in a year or so, as she'll fall way behind if we try to manage that one by ourselves. We'll need to equip the household with some new kinds of scissors. It's hard to see all the ramifications down the line just yet. This is going to be a learning experience for the whole family, and we'll have to take it step-by-step.