The Importance of Proper Penmanship

I walk into my family room the other day and notice a piece of paper with these words in huge two-inch high letters, written in bright green marker:

"Quick F*ck" (Um, the asterisk is my addition. There was a certain vowel in its place.)

Upon closer inspection, I realized that the paper in question was my six-year-old's Christmas list.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that including the F-word in correspondence to Santa puts one on his naughty list.

Now, my daughter is advanced for a first grader, but not that advanced, so I set off with my straightest of faces to investigate.

Turns out that she had asked her father to write down the names of certain toys for her Christmas list. Including "Quick Flick House of Style." And to her still-learning-to-spell eye, the "LI" in "FLICK" looked just like a "U."

I calmly point out the misspelling to her (well, as calmly as you can while suppressing laughter) and quickly write over the "U" with the proper letters lest the offending word burn itself into her sponge-like memory. I used the only writing implement handy, which was a ballpoint pen.

My correction didn't really cover up the "u"...but this was just her "sloppy copy" (all 5 pages of it, due to the extremely large writing and extremely frequent toy commercial viewing) and she would be rewriting it soon. Santa would be none the wiser.

Case closed. Or so I thought.

A few days later, my parents are visiting. My mother stops mid-conversation as her attention is drawn to our coffee table. "What...does...that...say?" she sputters out.

Seems that when I asked my daughter to pile up all her papers earlier that day, the one she had chosen to place on top was, of course, the one that still seemed to scream "F*ck" from halfway across the room.