Creepy smiles

I ate lunch with Emma (3rd grade)  at school yesterday and since it was a nice day we ate outside on a picnic table. We were totally alone and had a great chat.

Emma takes the world very, very seriously.  She works very hard and is meticulous in most areas.  She politely calls anyone (young or old, relative or otherwise) on the carpet for doing anything she deems outside the "acceptable" box.  She worries when she gets a grade less than 95% on an assignment or test.  She's also pretty shy and is uncomfortable when in a spotlight of any kind.

Because of Emma's serious, shy nature, she's not one to smile a lot.  And being at her school offered a painful reminder to me that she hasn't made a ton of friends since we moved back.  So, in the privacy of our picnic table, I asked Emma how many times she thinks she smiles at school during any given day.  She figured 2 or 3.

I challenged her to smile 10 times before the end of the school day.  She scrunched up her face and said, "But it's creepy when kids do that."

"What do you mean?"

"There's this girl in my class who sits across the room from me.  If I ever happen to look at her, she smiles.  It's creepy!"

I experimented with a variety of creepy smiles and asked her if any of my smiles resembled the girl's.  She laughed and said no.

"So it's creepy when someone just smiles a regular smile?  Why?"

"I don't know, it just is."

I knocked down the challenge from 10 smiles to 5 -- figured we'd start with the more reachable goal of asking her to be creepy only 5 times a day instead of 10.

Geez.

Emma at school -- I love her sweet, non-creepy smile!