Although an idle mind is said to be the devil's workshop, I am convinced that curiosity keeps a mother's mind from ever being idle. I am not sure that I was as much annoyed as I was amused by how much my mother knew about me. Although I often wondered “how did she know that,” I never realized how undaunted a mother's curiosity is until I watched from behind the scenes how my wife, Susan, overcame some challenging obstacles in learning facts about our daughters.

Curiosity can be a good thing, such as an interest to learn that which would be useful to mankind. But that's not the kind of curiosity that a mother has. Hers is more looking over other people's affairs and overlooking her own.

Our younger daughter, Kristen, discovered this with her mail during her senior year of high school. Holding the letter she had just opened from a college, Kristen asked her mother, “Guess what I got from XYZ college?” Expecting a reply of “What did you get?” Kristen's jaw dropped when her mother responded, “Aren't you happy you got in?”

Perhaps this could have been simply a mother's intuition or her confidence that Kristen's abilities would be recognized. But no . . . it was her mother's hard work, holding the letter in its envelop to a number of different light sources using varying magnifying devices in order to read its contents. I had been wondering why the battery of my Honda S2000 was low until I came home one day to find Susan and Susan's sister, Janice, holding a letter of Kristen's to the extra bright light of its halogen headlights!

Shortly thereafter, before leaving on vacation during the last week of March when college admission letters were due to be mailed, Kristen arranged for a neighbor to collect our mail so that it would be available for Kristen to review before returning to school. Unbeknown to Kristen was that Susan had arranged for Susan's sister to pickup the mail from our neighbor so that Susan could call and learn the size of any letters to Kristen before our return from vacation. A thick package means acceptance. A thin envelop means rejection.

Our older daughter, Meredith, scoffed, thinking that being in Colorado Springs was beyond the reach of her mother's curiosity, when I told her the story about Kristen's mail. But a week later Meredith was proven wrong!

Meredith, a junior at the Air Force Academy, had casually mentioned in an email that she had asked a cadet named Jesse as her date to a “ring dance,” which is the biggest social event during the junior year of a cadet's life at the Academy. Actually, the email wasn't addressed to us, but was sent to Meredith's sister, Kristen, who left it and an attached picture of Jesse open on her computer screen. All Meredith's mother had was a first name, “Jesse,” and a digitized picture.

Susan spent a whole day going through each of the 4,000 names of the cadets in the Air Force Academy's yearbook. Her task was complicated because all of the names in the yearbook, being of a service academy, are by last name.

And why, you may ask, was Susan who is otherwise a rational human-being undertaking this task? Well, it was the challenge of trying to find a last name that has a certain first name so that she could learn the class and squad number of the person having both names . . . without having to ask her daughter. I as a father would simply have asked Meredith, but I do admit that this may have resulted in Meredith's reaction that I was delving too far in her personal life. A more practical, less challenging, solution would have been simply to ask younger daughter Kristen to find out, but this would have revealed the secrets of a mother's curiosity to one of her children.

Susan was so proud of her accomplishment that she could hardly contain herself when I came home that night after she spent the day going through the yearbook. She recited name, both first and last, as well class and squad.

My response was “Who?” “Jesse, I found him on page 219.” “How'd you know to look at page 219?” “I didn't, so I looked through them all until I found 'Jesse' who has a picture that looks like the one Mer sent in her e-mail.” “How long did that take?” “Oh, most of the day.”

I advised Meredith that, because even the enemy is entitled to “name, rank, and serial number,” the next time she writes home about someone, especially a boy, “give your mother name, class, and squad. It would save a lot of hassle.”

Perhaps I made a mistake in so advising Meredith. If our daughters don't challenge Susan's curiosity, I fear she may turn it on me!