This is the text of a letter of recommendation written for KidTwo by her supervisor down in Bogota after she (KidTwo) finished her six-week summer job.

To Whom It May Concern:

 I had the pleasure of supervising [KidTwo] from June 16 – July 31, 2009 in the Political Section of the Department of State in U.S. Embassy Bogotá. In the short while that [KidTwo] was with us, she managed to leave a very lasting mark through her dedicated and diligent work in our Extradition Program.

 [KidTwo] was primarily responsible for updating the extradition database which had a backlog of over a year.  In a little over a month, she updated nearly 1,500 records and entered over 400 new cases in a Microsoft Access based database.  [KidTwo] not only mastered the technical aspects of the database, she also quickly learned the complicated and detailed process of extradition.  Her knowledge of both the legal process of extradition and the idiosyncrasies of the database allowed her to make invaluable design changes to the extradition database that will forever improve the efficiency and accuracy of our program.  Perhaps most importantly, [KidTwo]produced a final manual that summarized not only how to maintain the database, but how to generate and interpret reports from the database.

 [KidTwo] is a very fast learner and hard working person.  She is also extremely skillful using programs like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access.  However, her greatest asset is her problem solving abilities that allowed her to troubleshoot the many design flaws that existed with the extradition database.  It is for these reasons that I strongly recommend to you [KidTwo].

 Sincerely,

Me again.  Isn't that a nice letter?  Poor KidTwo--she never knows when I'll take something she writes or sends me and post it over here because I am just so darned proud of her and want to crow to the world about my wonderful girl.  Oh well, she has to let me do it, because she bounced herself out of her crib onto her head when she was three and she hid under a coat in JCPenneys when she was two and she slipped off the step in a pool when she was four and on two different occasions she stepped off a curb directly in the path of a moving vehicle.  She's alive today because of my vigilence, so I get bragging rights.

***Sometime after KidThree moved in but before she was shot, a friend of hers at the high school asked me how I could be her mother (not in the sense of our different ethnicities, but in the sense that KidThree was such a difficult and complex creature).  I just laughed and said, "because I'm [KidTwo]'s mother!"  After KidTwo, I can handle anything.

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