A compare-and-contrast exercise

I spent today in a training session for my position teaching writing next year. When Edith and Tom picked me up, I encountered Edith in an utterly delightful mood--meaning perfectly reasonable according to adult standards and interested in engaging in real give and take conversation. Soon after I'd gotten in the car she asked,

"Did you have a good day, Mom?"

"Yes, thank you for asking. I had a good day, though some of it was very hard work."

"Oh, well that's good that you had a good day. I had a good day, too. Daddy, did you have a good day?"

Tom agreed that he also had had a good day at church and thanked Edith for her inquiry.

I thought this might be a good time to alert Edith to some of the professional changes occurring in our family, since in her understanding of the world, kids and their parents all go to school every day: Little kids walk to school, big kids take the yellow schoolbus, and mommies and daddies get on a white school bus driven by Mr. Bob or Mr. Cliff. So we discussed the fact that we used to all go to school during the day, but now that Tom has graduated, he goes to work at church during the day instead. And that Mommy is learning to become a teacher, and when she graduates soon, she will still go to a school but she will be the teacher there instead of the student. I explained that kids' job is to go to school and be students, but grownups actually have all different kinds of jobs. Edith was very interested. I suspect it helped that the two types of jobs Tom and I are moving into are jobs she understands: teacher and minister. Glad we didn't have to try to convey to her what, say, a derivatives trader is.

Then Edith continued, "What did you do at your school today, Mommy?"

I told her that I had read things and written things and talked with other people about reading and writing. She affirmed this and moved on to other topics.

But later when we were hanging out at Tom's softball game, she asked me again what I had done with my day. I repeated that I had read, written, and talked to people all day. And I had had lunch, I added, figuring that might be of interest to a three year old. She mused for a moment, then nodded.

"I guess that's all right for grownups," she announced. "Yes, I guess that's all right for grownups. But my school is funner. You can play there. You can enjoy my school."

Sounds like the germ of an arguable thesis statement to me.