50

The lady was sitting opposite from me at the miniature table with the kid-sized chairs. She was guiding her grandson to color the bear outline printed out for everyone at the library playgroup. She scanned the room of babies for a second before looking at me. "So," she said, making the small talk necessary for such cramped spaces, "How many words is your daughter saying?"

The question surprised me, but the answer seemed to surprise her more. "Around 50," I said. It's not that I memorized them all, of course. I knew from the list.


Since the day Millie said her first word- "bye-bye"- I've written them all down. Most of them have dates missing, but the words and their unique pronunciations are there. And a few weeks ago, I ended the list at 50.  Her vocabulary grows almost daily, and soon she'll string together sentences that will turn into paragraphs are stories.

My memory is so poor, but I wanted to remember this. Because, out of everything she's done, speaking her first word was one of the most thrilling things to me. And when she's old and I'm much older, I can tell her even more than the story of "bye-bye".

I can tell her 50 stories.

____
P.S. You may have noticed some change around here. Thank you to Fran from Free Borboleta for designing my new blog header! Doesn't it look fresh? After much debate on Facebook, this was the one most liked by all of you, so I switched things up accordingly. I'll be getting a matching blog button soon.