Her Majesty

The title of this entry used to be Kitty's nickname. When people find out they always ask, “Why did you call her ‘Her Majesty’”?  The answer is simple: we believe that she was a member of a royal family in a former life.  Go ahead and laugh, but this girl picked up habits and knowledge that she didn’t get from us, and were like second nature to her!

For instance, when she was just a toddler, she decided that she wouldn’t eat any food unless it was presented to her under a cover, with a flourish!  Who was she, Louis XIV?  I’m serving a two-year-old her toddler food under a silver pot top because it was the closest I could find to a food cover.  And of course, I had to say “Ta da!” when I whipped off the cover to present her kid’s meal!

Then it got to the point where she wouldn’t eat off of paper plates.  I figured if I didn't want to wash dishes, this way I wouldn’t have to.  Wrong!  She always had to have a regular plate; too good for the Hefty!

Then there was her manner of speaking, but this could be attributed to the fact that she had speech therapy for a while.  She was enunciating more properly than the Queen, which of course made her sister and I sound…less than royal, we’ll say!

She was also extremely intelligent: much more so than her years warranted.  While Brie was reading Sweet Valley High, Kitty was reading books on Meteorology, Astronomy and nature.  And then she would quiz her sister and I!  I’d be driving her to school and she would say, “Mom, what kind of cloud is that ahead?”  I’d immediately panic and start to sweat, because I could only remember one cloud from high school science.  “Um…a cumulo-nimbus?”  “No!” she’d say in exasperation.  “It’s a nimbostratus, the same kind I showed you yesterday!”  My only saving grace was she didn’t end her sentence with “Duh!”

Her sister wasn’t exempt from the quizzing either.  At night if we were out, she’d ask Brie, “What’s the name of that constellation?” and she’d point at the sky.  Unfortunately, like me, Brie could only identify the two dippers and Orion.  “Um, the Little Bear?”  “No, it’s Cassiopeia, like I told you last time!”  Poor Brie!

But what really sets her apart is her memory for just about anything she has read or seen.  One night we’re playing “Outburst!” and we get to the category of famous composers.  Brie and I came up with about five or six that were on the card but Kitty, who wasn’t even playing and just happened to be walking through the room, named all twelve composers.  I barely knew twelve composers, to say nothing of being able to guess which ones were on the card!

What’s listed above barely scratches the surface of Ms. Kitty's blue blood.  But thankfully, she has stopped treating Brie and I like the peasants she obviously thought we were!