I’ve always felt more comfortable expressing myself in writing than I have speaking, and it looks like my girl is going to be the same way.

This tendency was first noticed one weekend when we were having a bad day. I can’t remember exactly what we were arguing over. Probably something like me telling her she couldn’t go play with her friend because her room needed to be cleaned up first, or something similar. She had stormed off to sulk in her room, and as is my practice, I was ignoring such behavior and going about my day doing laundry.

After a while I could hear her slipping around the house, careful to avoid being seen. And little notes started popping up on table tops and taped to walls. The first ones were angry and mean. I continued to ignore and quit reading them until she asked me to look at one in particular. When I saw it said she was having “werd fillins,” my heart had a few weird feelings of its own. So, I asked her if she wanted to talk about how she was feeling and we had a great discussion about what had happened.

Well, over her Spring Break and while I was attending SXSW Interactive, she and her dad got to spend quite a lot of time together. Evidently one of those days he too laid down some law that she didn’t like because she left him a note that I couldn’t help but laugh at; and, when I shared it with some friends at SXSW the next day, they all agreed I should share it with you:

Now before anyone gets worried and starts recommending we all go for family counseling, take a look at the note she left him the next day:

I’m definitely going to hold on to these and look forwarding to seeing how her writing evolves. Something tells me she won’t share it as openly in a few years and most of her “werd fillins” will be locked away in a private diary, so I’ll enjoy it while I can.