Tall Tales

Don't tell Olivia, but she is currently the family shrimp.

I'm not calling her short. None of my kids qualify as short. In fact, I'm pretty certain that my long-held dream of having a jockey in the family is never going to be realized. But in relation to her siblings at the same age, Olivia is not on the same growth curve.

We measured her height yesterday on the our trusty famiy 2x4, where we keep track of everybody's heights at different ages. She is running a good two inches shorter than Duncan was at 6, and Duncan was a couple inches shorter than anybody else in the family at that age.

Not that this means anything.

Growing up, Mitch was always the tall kid. Everybody thought Mitch was going to take after his two grandpas and hit 6'4 or 6'5. But he seems to have topped out at 6'1. I guess in some families, 6'1 would be huge, but for Featherstone-Metcalf genes, it's not that tall at all.

Duncan, who was pretty average as a kid, has now passed up Mitch in height, and hasn't shown any signs of slowing down yet.

And Alisa- she never even made it to the back row in elementary school class pictures! I used to tell her she would never be as tall as me. And now she is 5'10, pretty tall even by our standards.

Will and Audrey are too young to tell yet. They have both always run on the tall side of things, but I'm done guessing. It seems to be a crapshoot. For all I can tell, my shrimpy Olivia will be the one towering over the rest of them someday.

Even with her height challenges, she says that so far, being six is fabulous.