When she was young it was difficult, as it is with most young children, to entice her to try new and different foods. And we had ample opportunity to witness how difficult it was. After raising our own three children, we thought it would be a simple task to give ourselves over to becoming daytime caregivers for our first and only grandchild. At age 60, we soon discovered, that task is far more difficult than it is at age 23.

Moreover, she was born, like her mother, a contrarian. Making most things more complicated than they actually were, balking at suggestions or recommendations, and stamping her little feet in absolute rejection of anything resembling an order. To say she had a mind of her own is the classic understatement.

Now, she is in firm control of her own mind, fully deserving of all the respect we have no hesitation whatever in rendering its full due. Our daily care of her as an infant and young child is long in the past, and we wonder sometimes how much of that experience she can recall and how it will add to the various exposures and experiences that will shape her life as she continues to mature and face her future.

We admire her perseverance, her bright intelligence, her curiosity about the world around her, and her faithfulness to books, valuing them somewhat higher on her scale of necessities, than she does her computer and her BlackBerry, and her iPod, all constant companions. And we wonder also that she tends to telephone us on a daily basis, on her return home from her high school classes.

We're re-living, in a sense, what we ourselves experienced when we were children, then again throughout our children's growing years; seen from a somewhat different perspective.