1-800-ABCDEFG

So I'm sitting at my computer yesterday when my daughter thrusts her ABC book into my stomach cavity and produces a series of grunts and velociraptor sounds which, in her language, means, Read this before I throw this Elmo phone through the flat screen TV!

So I proceed to open the book and she quickly flips through the pages, not letting me read any, so that she can get to the alphabet chart in the back. She points to the letter A and says, Ay! I almost had a damn heart attack. It's like the lottery, every parent hopes they win a genius child. Not just a smart kid, anybody can have one of those, but to actually have a fourteen month old who can read...I can just see people holding banquets in my honor, like...how did you do it?

I must've scared the poor baby half to death yelling out, YES, YES that is an A. What's this one? She jumped back, dropped the book and her eyes started watering up. While I'm trying to calm her down and reassure that she didn't do anything wrong, I'm also breaking out my phone so that I can record it and put it on Youtube. (Good Morning America, here we come!)

So, the camera's rolling, I pick up the book and we go at it again. She points at the first letter and says, Ay!
(My baby's a genius).

Then she points to the H and says, Ay!
(Phonetically, H starts off sounding just like A. As in Ay-CH. She's one, so maybe she just says it like that.)

Then she points to the N and says, Ay!
(...)

She looks up at me with so much hope, like all of her future self esteem is riding on me reacting the same way as I did the first time. The little people who live in my head and tell me what to do called an emergency meeting. Do I correct her and inadvertently crush her self esteem setting in motion a chain reaction that ends with her at "The Pole?" If I don't correct her will I be setting her up for a false sense of accomplishment that will eventually be stripped away on the first day of preschool when the kids laugh at her for not knowing her ABCs and thus leading to a life of crime and drugs that inevitably end at "The Pole?"

(I now know what it must feel like to be the President.)

I clapped, picked her up and gave her a big kiss.

You're so smart! How'd you get to be so smart? That is Ay...letter called N!