The One With the Yearbooks

K brought her Nintendo Wii along with her for her two-week visit, and I am quite pleased and satisfied to say that it's still tucked away in the bag she brought it in. She's been playing, basically non-stop, my old circa 1993 Super Nintendo. It makes me proud.

One of the games she especially loves is Mario Paint. You can't play it with the controllers -- you have to use the mouse that came with the game. It also has a mousepad that goes with it, but I've misplaced that somewhere back at my dad's house. I still have it, but I haven't made the effort to track it down. As such, when you play the game, you have to have some kind of flat surface to put the mouse on. A couple of nights ago, I noticed that K had pulled one of my old yearbooks off the shelf to use as the mousepad.

When she'd finished playing, I picked up the yearbook and told her that it was my 2nd grade yearbook. She's going into 2nd grade this year, so that piqued her interest. She looked up my picture and told me how cute I was.

Then she proceeded to through all my yearbooks, looking for my picture, and making commentary on and asking things about stuff I'd written in the books.

"Why does this girl have her face colored in?"
"Because she was mean to me."
"I have a friend that's mean to me."
"If she's mean to you, why is she your friend?"
"Well, she used to do this every time I looked at her." (Rolls her eyes and puts on bitchface.)
"Does she still do it?"
"No. We're friends now."

The politics of 1st graders.

"Why did you put checkmarks beside these people?"
"Those were my friends."
"I have lots of friends."

Then I showed her my elementary school boyfriend (my longest-term relationship to date, lasting from kindergarten until 4th grade, when I left to go to a different school). He just got married, incidentally.

"Cute," K said.

She shuffled through the yearbooks for a while longer until she got to high school.

"Why do three of these say 'high school' on them?"
"Because I was at that high school for three years. I was at a different school for 9th grade."
"Four years?"
"Yeah. High school lasts four years."
"No it doesn't."
"Yeah it does."
"I won't be in high school for four years."
"I bet you will."

She told me I was pretty in all of my high school pictures. (Why can't EVERYONE look at people like kids do?)

Then I said, "Hey, I'll show you my boyfriend from 11th grade." I paged through the Junior class until I came to his picture. I pointed it out to her.

She didn't say anything. She just laughed. I'm not sure why, but she just laughed.

And that's why we get along.