In a recent blog post, I mentioned that I didn’t learn to speak until I was three.

I probably knew this and forgotten. I remember my mother telling me that she had waited forever for me to talk and once I did I never shut up. But for me, obviously because I’m a late bloomer of sorts, I didn’t have this fact click in my head until recently.
I had gone back to my baby book to look up an illness that I had known that I’d had, but I couldn’t remember when I had it. With both my parents gone, the only way I have this information now is by referencing what my mother wrote down, which was a lot.

It almost makes me so feel sorry my children because I didn’t have time to write down their lives in this kind of detail. Fortunately for me, they’re smarter than me and I’ve told him the stories so many times, because I’m a storyteller, that they probably know it all by heart.

I would insert a picture of my overflowing baby book here if I wasn’t terrified of pulling it out from where it’s at right now. I swear it is crammed with nearly everything I did up through 4th grade and even a few things beyond.

Anyway, I went back to my baby book and saw all the references from the first few years of my life where Mom was putting in there about me not talking yet. I finally started flipping through to see when I started talking and it was apparently after my third birthday. My parents were both highly concerned apparently, though I’m sure my father was making frequent references about how Einstein didn’t start speaking until he was four as well (as several other obscure references no one but him understood in that time before Google), so surely I would be a genius.

Then came the real shocker for me.

Apparently, my first word after the usual “mama” and “da da” was “book.”

Book. Imagine that. I just laughed out loud. I suppose it really shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was delightful. I suppose I just never had anything to say until I could tell stories, because I know I’ve been telling stories since I was four.

I love to tell stories. I love to write. And my first word was book. I honestly think I came into this world knowing what I really wanted to do.

That makes me one of the lucky ones.