Talk to the Hand

Christmas Jollies and the associated Tribal Family Gatherings always bring up lots of weird little anecdotes from the past. The more embarassing, the more commonplace it seems. But this year, one popped up which would appear to explain rather a lot about me...

When I was little (think 4 to 7 years old), I used to come home from school/playtime/scouts/parties/sleepovers (and whatever else a 4-7 year old gets up to) and would excitedly rush to my parents to tell them all about my latest wild adventures, only to be greeted by this:


As I started talking, the number of fingers on mum or dad's hand would gradually start counting down with the number of sentences I had already blurted out.

It seems that my 4-7 year old self had a few issues with structured, concise or even logical tale-telling. So my parents had invented the 5 finger rule: Each finger represented a sentence, and I was given 5 sentences to explain my story to them. It always panicked me greatly. Because there was soooooo much to tell and so little time to tell it in. And if I didn't blurt it all out as the memories popped into my head, I might forget about em all, and then how would anyone ever know about all the weird things I learned or just how much fun I had!?! *shock-horror-panick*

lol

I do remember mum&dad smiling at me as I got more nervous with each countdown of a finger. My face must have shown just how hard my little mind was trying to figure out how to make the whole story fit into the very last finger. On occasions, when I was *really* over-excited, they would burst out grinning and start counting down the fingers of the other hand as well, to allow me a little more time.

Tell you what though... my excited all-over-the-place approach to tale telling has since been streamlined in an uncanny ability to make VERY long sentences, indeed. Hurray to parenting! ;-)