My mom bought a baby book for me when I was little. Its chapters were broken down by developmental stages and included numerous questions about things a child might be doing in each stage: Does she eat solid foods? Does she have an imaginary friend? What are her favorite games? That sort of thing. Mom was always quite diligent about pasting photos onto the book's pages, but as time passed, the questions fell by the wayside.

I loved looking through that book, and I did so regularly. Perhaps that's why one day, when I was 7, I decided something really needed to be done about all that blank space where mom's answers to questions about me would have gone. I therefore took out a pen and responded to all the questions in the "Age 7-8" chapter. However, I had this vague idea that the person answering the questions was supposed to be an objective source, and I was clearly not an objective source. My solution to this problem was to write everything in the third person. Apparently, it did not occur to me that my 7 year-old scrawl might give me away.

Does your child have a best friend or friends?
Yes. She likes Sally.

Does she watch television? What are her favorite shows?
The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, ect.

What are her least favorite shows?
Gunsmoke ect.

I liberally peppered my responses with "ect," quite enamored of the fact that it was such a convenient rhetorical device. I thought it stood for something, but I didn't know what—hence the transposition of 'c' and 't.' What I did know was that it was a really short way of saying, "Yeah, there's more, but I'm too lazy to write it out just now." I think I should take a lesson from my childhood self by turning in a dissertation with 40 pages of content and 200 pages that say "ect."

My favorite question-and-answer pairing was the following:

Your daughter has probably shown an interest in the telephone. Does she enjoy talking on the phone? Can she dial the numbers by herself?
Yes, she can. She does it good, too!

Ah, little Shasta liked cutting right to the chase. Screw the first part; what could she do? Unfortunately, she did not yet like differentiating between adjectives and adverbs. I don't know what they were teaching her down in Texas.