Be careful

Warning: If you are not one to indulge proud parents who tell stories about their kids, then read no further.

Last weekend, 5-year old daughter Hannah put on a concert for her parents (which included costume changes, makeup, curtains, a dramatic reading, and two songs, one a standard, the other an improvised punk song played on an authentic pink guitar she owns, although I play it too, right now it's in open G tuning, but I digress...) The first performance in the set consisted of her singing a Christmas song while holding a sheet of paper with handwritten lyrics on it. After the show, we looked at it quickly and it just looked like her practicing how to write letters, which she often does. It read:

GNIDUPEGIFMOSSGNERBO

for the second verse, which just looks like random gibberish. However, the song she was singing was "We Wish You A Merry Christmas," in which the second verse goes "O, bring us some figgy pudding." Two nights after the performance, Shelly was looking at the piece of paper again and the lightbulb went off: if you read the letters from right to left and put in the correct spaces, you have:

O BRENG S SOM FIGE PUDING

We were stunned- it was like cracking the Rosetta Stone. The rest of the document started to reveal all of the phoentic spellings (e.g. "MARE KRSMS"). Although Hannah doesn't read yet and doesn't begin kindergarten until September, it looks like her brain has been processing what she's been learning with her Leapster toy along with the (pats himself on the back) mini-lessons we've had regarding letters and phonetics. For instance, I explained to her a few weeks ago that an 'n' followed by a 'g' at the end of a word produces that "ng" sound, which obviously she retained.

Shelly says Smith but I'm thinking Brown.