[caption id="attachment_619" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Maddie from Indonesia"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Recent-913-001.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-619" title="Recent 913 001" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Recent-913-001-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

She's almost 2.

When you ask my granddaughter Madison Nicole how old she is, that's the answer she gives.

<em>"Almost 2."</em>

In fact, pretty Maddie will be 2 in six more days, and in that short time she has already lived in three different countries. Maddie was born in Beijing, spent a year in Washington, D.C., and now is enjoying life in Surabaya, Indonesia.

That kid is going to have one fascinating life.

You can't imagine how wonderful it is when we connect on our weekend calls. Maddie's little face lights up when the video connection is made and she says, "Hi, grandpa!"

I've written about the wonders of Skype before, and it really is amazing to be able to make phone calls with video across 14 time zones. It can get sort of annoying when the video sort of freezes up, but I'm probably asking for too much for it to be perfect all the time. Calls are dropped occasionally, but no more often than cellphone calls were a few years ago.

What fascinates me, what is so different from my relationship with my grandparents when I was her age (back in 1952), is that I will be able to see her, hear her and watch as she grows from week to week. When we talked the other night, she showed me a game that she and her parents are playing. Pauline and Ryan put Maddie into an empty laundry basket and rock it back and forth while singing "Row, row, row your boat."

This time she got into the basket a