"The Champions"

This past day, I got a call at work, and after a pause, the other squeaky voice on the other end of the line started talking, and it turned out to be Ian, absolutely thrilled because he and I BOTH won the pumpkin's-weight-guessing contest at his school. Yesterday was Open House, and we all went, and one of the attractions was a contest where both parents and children submit a guess, on a small white piece of paper set into a basket, as to how much the pumpkin on the shelf weighed.

Ian thought it was ten pounds. I thought it might be more like 12, but because Ian is smarter than me, I guessed ten pounds, just as he had.

It turned out that the pumpkin actually weights 12 pounds, and Ian's guess was the closest among children, and mine was the closest among parents. Ian was all the more impressed because he knew I had thought it weighed 12 pounds, even though I wrote down ten, and I turned out to be exactly right. He told me what other people had guessed, but they all turned out to be wrong, whereas we were right, or very close.

We don't know what the prizes are, but we'll find that out tomorrow, and Ian is eagerly looking forward to making that discovery. He was so happy, he kept me on the phone for about ten minutes, even though we didn't have too much to say about the pumpkin contest after about four or five. When I came home in the evening, he reminded me of our triumph from time to time, and when I asked him at supper if he had had a good day, of course it turned out that he had.

(September 16, 2010)