You go, Tessie!

I took Tessie to the park today. She played in the sandbox, climbed on the play structures, rode the bouncy cars, and, oh yeah, totally smacked down some little punk chauvinist.

Tessie and this little boy were chatting as they played side by side. The boy, whose name I'll omit to spare him future embarrassment, asked Tessie how old she was. "Three and a half," Tessie replied.

"I'm three and a half. You don't talk like a three and a half [year old]," the boy replied, clearly impressed with Tessie's outstanding vocabulary and diction.

At that point, I asked the boy his birthday. "September Fourth," he told me.

"Then Tessie is only a month older than you," I informed him.

"She is too tall to be three and a half," he replied.

While sensing that he was calling my integrity into question, I let it slide, and went back to observing their interactions.

"Are you a boy or a girl," the boy asked.

"I'm a girl," Tessie told him.

"Why do you have a crab on your shirt? Only boys like crabs." Tessie was wearing a shirt with a cartoon lobster on it, and it read "Lotsa Lobster." [Target, $8.99, FYI.]

"It's a lobster," Tessie told him, then marched right up to him. "See? It says 'lobster' right here."

"How do you know what it says?" the boy asked.

Then came the best part: Tessie raised herself up to her full height, towering two or three inches over the boy, pulled her shoulders back and stated matter-of-factly, "I can read it. I know how to read. I learned from my Mommy and Daddy."