Claire's First Story

         Claire walked in the house and called “Mom, I'm home.” Her mother came out from the kitchen with a mixing bowl, “Hi honey, How was school today? Come on in the kitchen and tell me all about it while I fix supper.” Claire drops her backpack outside the kitchen doorway and toward one of the bar stools and has a seat, her voice becomes faster as she shows her excitement, “Mrs. Parker told us about this really cool web site called Writing.com that she found the other night. She told us that it is content rated, so that kids can safely join without reading things that they should not read. I wondered Mom, could we check it out? You know how much I like writing.” Her mother took one stern look at her, then smiled showing that she approved, “Go look it up on the den computer and I will be down there in five minutes to check it over with you” then she turned to finish her cooking.

         Claire was out of there like a bolt of lightning, before her mom got halfway turned around she was down the hall in the den. Claire knew good and well that she was not allowed to search the web or join web sites without Mom’s approval, she had her fingers crossed as she booted up the computer and was trying to decide what she wanted to write about first. The computer finally finished its work and now she turned on Internet Explorer and put the web address in the address box and hit return.

         She was in her own little creative slice of heaven. The site looked amazing even from the very first page. She read every single speck of information she could from the opening page. She happened to notice on the right column a little tidbit of information it was the Writing.com’s third birthday. This was getting better by the moment. She heard her mom coming in the den, “Ok Claire, lets check this out.” Claire smiled, they sat side by side for about an hour discussing the web site and looking it all over. Her mother finally looked down at her, “Well this looks like it deserves a good trial run, what do you think?” Claire smiles and hugs her mom, “Thank you so much” Mom looks down at her, “It’s ok, I want to read your stuff too hun, Lets fill out the signup info for the free membership and let you give a crack at this.” So they filled out the forms then Mom went back to the kitchen to check on dinner and to let Claire work on her first story.

         Claire sat in front of the computer and rubbed her hands together lightly to warm her hands up and her noggin. It was a habit she had taught herself to get her ready to write. She had been thinking about what she wanted to write for her first story while they had been looking over the web site. So she sat there for 45 minutes and wrote her story about the Birthday Celebration of Writing.com. It was a short story about how she wanted to celebrate the special time with her new community of friends, from near and far. It also told how proud she was to be a part of something greater than herself, and how she wanted to learn from as well as help other kids on the site. She spellchecked it in her word processing program and cut/pasted it into the web site. She called to her mother when she was done and in a few minutes time, her mom came, “All finished Claire?” Claire nodded and smiled. Mom came behind her and read the story, she hugged her daughter, “That was a beautiful story honey, I loved it.”