n apartment. She is just a few paychecks away from true independence.So in honor of her, I have decided to dedicate today's blog post to my Zabby, child of my youth, through whom I have lived vicariously for many years.
***At the request of Zabby, this post is being edited so that it won't embarrass her as much. Thus, I must delete my first, favorite memory of her which demonstrates what a precocious child she was, and her future as an artist as well.
Instead, I'll replace it with an equally delightful, if rather more ... clean ... example of her early-developing artistic talent. When Zabby was just a baby, we lived in Omaha, where we bought our first house, right outside the back gate of the Air Force base where her dad was stationed. It was an older house, but we'd put a lot into fixing it up, including installing some beautiful champagne-colored carpet in the living room, right before we moved in. At the time, her sister was not quite 1 year old, and she kept me completely exhausted, and little Zabby, at 3 years old, was a real dynamo. She was absolutely obsessed with Jello, so I tried to provide plenty of it for her, as bribery material. Also, unlike her fully-developed nocturnal personality, she loved to get up entirely too early. So one morning, imagine my delight as I crept from my bed before the sun came up, to strange sounds, resembling an elephant with bronchitis, coming from our living room / kitchen area. Baseball bat in hand, I prepared to eliminate the intruder, until I found, lit only by the light coming from the open refrigerator door, my darling child, with about 6 packs of Jello cups, open on my living room carpet, where she repeatedly shoved her tiny hands into the cups, making a horrendous, flatulating noise, before "painting" the Jello all over our brand new carpet. I dropped my bat to the floor, and cried. I scrubbed until my hands were raw. I rented a steam cleaner. I even called in the professionals, but nothing would remove my child's artwork from the floor. On the up-side, she was the first baby in her play group to figure out that blue plus red equals purple.
Her artwork has always been special. After that little incident, I tried to make sure she always had plenty of legitimate materials to work with - crayons, paint, sand, mashed potatoes, whatever. She used to make great pictures in her mashed potatoes with her finger, and sometimes a pea or two. But they were never little kid pictures - no happy little houses, and smiley faces and stick people. She had a whole different way of thinking from day one. She made pictures of cats with three tails (so they could braid them), or houses with bubble windows with goldfish in them, and gardens full of Barbie dolls on green stems. What a unique and joyful child she was!When she was about 4 years old, I started letting her play with my computer. One day, she got on MS Paint, and drew a Winnie the Pooh, off the top of her head, in color, that was so amazingly realistic you would have thought an adult did it. (In fact, I tried to copy it later, and found that I couldn't do anything like it.)
In kindergarten, she wrote a story about an elephant which could blow rainbows out of its' trunk. The pictures were incredible. I kept thinking if I could ever find a way to publish it, I would, but of course there was never enough money, or time, or whatever.
When she was in second grade, we moved to South Carolina where I got my first teaching job. There, she drew a series of 4 pictures, of the same landscape over 4 seasons, and wrote a poem to go with them. Her teacher entered her work into the Young Author's contest, and she won the award for our school, district and eventually the state, and her work was hung in the Governor's mansion for a year. As you can imagine, I was, and am, very proud of her.
I could tell a hundred more stories of the creative things she has written or drawn (or animated on her computer) or of her beautiful singing voice, or moving theatrical performances, but I
won't continue to embarrass her. She's a gifted girl, who has a lot to offer to the world, once she finds her niche. I have enjoyed being a witness to her growth these last 20 years, and I'm looking forward to seeing how she turns out once she has fully spread her wings and shown just what she can do. 
And with that in mind, I will end this post with one of my favorite Zabby quotes: "Mom, can I borrow your screwdriver? I want to grind holes in the trees to make doors for the bugs, so the birds won't have to work so hard to get them out." (Zabby, age 5)
