Oh, mom...

(Crap... I thought I pressed "publish" yesterday...)
I was just on freerice.com, doing some grammar skills tuning, and I came across a phrase that made me smile. It didn't make me smile, even laugh a little, because I knew it, but how I knew it. My mother likes to tell people stories of when I was little, as I'm sure any parent would. Naturally people have a favourite story to tell, or a collection of stories to tell. My mother is kind of a pack rat, so of course she has a collection of stories to tell about me as well as my brother.

Well, my mother has this one story that she loves to tell everyone, probably to show how smart I was(and am?) and to impress others with my intelligence. The story goes "I remember when Martha was in... was it preschool or kindergarten? Well, I remember when she was around that age, I was talking to her teacher. Apparently Leslie, Martha's teacher, had told her to do something. Replied Martha: 'If I were to do that, I would have done it.' This kind of startled Leslie because what five year old would say that?", and then she always adds, "my daughter, of course!" I guess that's what happens when English majors have kids.

I suppose because of my mom's major in English and her constant chatter with me as a baby, speaking "properly" comes easily to me. A lot of the time I don't use my grammatical skills to their full potential, though. Maybe I don't because it sounds too formal? I really can't stand formalities all the time. It really bothers and irritates me. That's probably why I have such a wide range of friends... Because I am alright with speaking without all the correct grammar that my mother uses, and I never rue my decision.