Last night we were all at home, each busy with our own projects: Daddy was in the back part of the house focusing on a to-do list regarding his duties at work; I was at the other end of the house, in the dining room, doing some research and reading online; my eldest daughter was at the dining room table writing a letter to a favorite contemporary composer and requesting an autograph and my younger daughter was sitting on the floor in the adjoining living room. She was working on a huge project: cutting out hundreds and hundreds of flannelboard figures and objects. After working through the “rough-cut” stage during other cutting sessions, last night she was making the “final cut”: clean, accurate and exact.

Even though we were all busy, still there was a certain amount of visiting going on: sometimes a comment, sometimes a question, and sometimes a “Come here and look at this!” At one point my eldest daughter called me over to proof-read her letter before she sent it off. I was standing at the dining room table discussing the letter with her, when my younger daughter raised her voice from the living room and directed this comment to her sister, “I know you don’t like Roman funerals…”

What?!! What did she say? What did she mean? Did she say what I thought she said? As these thoughts galloped around in my thinking, my letter-writing daughter assured me and clarified, “She means Roman numerals!” How we laughed! “Roman funerals!” That’s quite a different subject than Roman numerals. Laughter and merriment reigned for a few minutes and more, even drawing Daddy out to discover what was so funny.

Today I was thinking over what had happened and I wondered: Why did my younger daughter even make a comment about Roman numerals in the first place? So I asked. She told me she had been cutting out flannel objects from the Old Testament Bible account of Moses receiving God’s laws. She had been cutting out the stone tablets and upon the tablets were carved the ten commandments. In these illustrations the commandments were numbered using Roman numerals. She was going to encourage her older sister (who really did not enjoy studying Roman numerals) that it was good that she had studied them, because now she could easily read the numbers on the stone tablets. These are the sisterly interactions that make me smile.

*My younger daughter is a year-and-a-half new to the United States. She is an English-learner; her first language is Chinese. She is doing superbly learning English, but every once in a while, a small slip of the lip can significantly change the meaning of her communication.