On Being Seven

Hi. I’m M. Peevie. I’m seven. What is it like to be seven? Well, when you’re seven, you get a purple I-Pod for your birthday that your dad has loaded with some of your favorite music, like the Beatles, Sheryl Crow, High School Musical, and Hannah Montana. This makes you very happy, and you listen to it the whole time during dinner at the restaurant, and it makes your parents happy, too, because you’re not talking constantly and provoking your brothers.

When you’re seven, you do provoke your brothers a lot, but not because you necessarily want to provoke them, but because they’re so sensitive about having you in their room touching their stuff, and also apparently it embarrasses them when you hug and kiss their friends. But they’re nice friends, and that’s what you do when you’re seven and people are nice to you: you hug and kiss them.

I pretty much hug and kiss everyone I meet. I love my school principal, and my teacher, and my friends, and their moms, and my neighbors, and my mom’s friends. I smile at them, a lot, and I have a dimple, and I think that makes them smile back at me, and when they do, I can’t help myself. I squeeze them so hard that when I let go, they are a little bit concave. That’s a big word, isn’t it? I like big words.

Speaking of big words, I pretty much have never met a word I didn’t like. I like words, and I like to talk. There’s so much to talk about; how can I not talk? At dinner time, we talk about how our day was, and what the highlight of our day was, and I always have a story to tell about my best friend Josie or my best friend Kayla. Sometimes my story ends with me telling my mom and dad that my teacher had to move my seat in first grade again because I was talking too much.

Except for getting my seat moved for talking too much, I really love school. Actually, I don’t even mind getting my seat moved, ‘cause then I get to talk to somebody new. I like school because it’s fun and easy. My mom says my teacher needs to challenge me more, but I told her I like it when it’s easy, because then I can get my work done quick and have more time to play. She says I am a girl after her own heart.

I have a lot of best friends. Best friends are great. Some best friends live in your neighborhood, and sometimes you fight with them about who gets to play with the straight hair Barbie and who gets to play with the curly hair Barbie—but it doesn’t mean you’re not best friends anymore.

One thing that’s not great about being seven is that you get your feelings hurt sometimes. My mom says my feelings get hurt if someone looks at me wrong, but that doesn’t happen a lot. Usually my feelings get hurt because someone looked at me wrong with a mean face or made a mean sound at the same time. And sometimes my feelings get hurt when my brother calls me a nickname that I do not like, which is called Foghorn Voicebox. When he says that my mom says, "Pot? Kettle. Kettle? Pot."

I gave my daddy a nickname which is called Soft Head Warm Head because his head is soft and warm. My daddy likes his nickname, I think. He smiles a warm smile and tilts his head next to mine when I call him that, and we have a huggy moment.

My mom says she can’t believe I’m seven already, which is silly because seven comes after six. Even preschoolers know that. Sometimes she’s sad that I’m getting big so fast, and she says, “Stop growing up so fast!” But I can’t stop growing up so fast, because that’s how God made the world we live in, and it goes around on its axis and floats in space with the other planets, which we learned last year when I was only in kindergarten.

The end.