Beatrice's memory

Here is Beatrice reciting almost all of her book Peedie from memory:

She can in fact recite most of her favorite books in their entirety, including Olivia, Madeline, and Big Dog, Little Dog. Which means I can no longer fool her by skipping some pages in her longer storybooks: "Read The Runaway Bunny," she will say, "and read all the pages."

In general, Beatrice has an incredibly good memory. She knows, for example, the names of every child in her preschool class and the children in the next grade up, too, as well as the names of their parents, the cars their parents drive, and the design of their lunchboxes.

Beatrice at a birthday party with her school friends Adeline and Nicolas

More than that, she has a long memory - she often starts up a conversation with me by saying, "Do you remember ... ?" and then recalls the smallest details from her birthday party last May or her trip to Dallas with Dev last August. Sometimes I'll think she is making up something only to find later that she's remembering a real event I had long forgotten.

I don't know how much of this is typical for all kids her age and how much is just Beatrice - Dev says he had this sort of memory as a child so perhaps that's where she gets it - but it's led to a number of nice developments. For one, it's all the more gratifying to plan parties, holidays, and other events knowing that she'll lovingly recall details from them for a year afterward.

Beatrice and Miller at Jack's house

More than that, the improvement of Beatrice's memory has assisted in the development of two other signs of maturity: gratitude and remorse. Anyone who has ever given Beatrice a present might like to know that she remembers every single gift she's ever been given by anyone, no matter how small, and every time she uses the gift she thanks the giver again. It's "Thank you, Rosemary, for my pizza set!" or "Thank you, Travis' mommy, for my dog book!" every single time she takes them out to play with them. She also thanks me for everything I do for her, including regular parental duties like changing her clothes, making her dinner, cleaning her room, or helping her brush her teeth, and often weeks after I helped her with something she'll say at random, "Thank you, Mommy, for changing my sheets when I spilled water all over my bed." In the beginning, she learned to say thank you simply by rote but over time I think she has developed a genuine sense of gratitude that is one of her more charming traits.

Miller's father Evan helping Beatrice pick oranges

Even more affecting is Beatrice's sense of remorse. As with favors and gifts, Beatrice remembers every single bad thing she has ever done. And as with saying "thank you," "sorry" seems to have gone from a rote recitation to a genuine state of mind. Weeks after Beatrice has committed some wrong and been chastised for it, she will say out of the blue, "I am so sorry I hit Arthur with a shovel," in the saddest voice, or hug me and say, "Mommy, I am sorry I am sometimes too bad."

Of course, lest you think Beatrice sounds too perfect, I remind you that these heartbreaking renunciations of past deeds don't necessarily translate into her doing better next time.

Comically, her powers of memory have well outpaced her powers of cognition, so she can recite the alphabet and the numbers 1-20, but she doesn't really understand what letters are and she can only meaningfully count to 4. But it's interesting to see the ways in which memory allows her to have a sense of self, relationships, time, and cause and effect.