First of all, I have a feeling that her parents are getting used to letters from Dumbledore.
Maybe the once received one something along the lines of:
"Sorry, but your daughter has been petrified. Her best friends went into a part of the school we didn't know existed to battle a monster that kills on sight (the same one that petrified your daughter) where one of the best friend's sister was being held captive by the 16 year old memory of the world's worst evil. But don't worry, everything's fine, and no one was hurt except for one of our teacher's who accidently removed his own memory while attempting to attack her friends. Don't worry, we're hiring a werewolf for this next year. He's very friendly and never attacked a student during the duration of his career here. Now his friends did, but that's another story and the boy was just fine and lived to teach here and terrorize students."
And, I have a feeling Dumbledore might have written her parents after years one and three as well.
And they might have gotten one earlier in first year about being out all night, and Hermione might have had a hard time explaining that they were getting an illegal dragon off of school grounds.
But what I loved was:
"Not for the first time, she wonders if she really is the only witch in the family."
Sorry to disappoint, but knowing what to say to make things all right has little to do with magic.
Especially since by this time her mother is probably very good with getting letters at the end of the year, and then waiting for daughter to come home wondering if she could have gotten up to something else in the meantime.
I like Hermione's mum!! And I like how utterly clueless Hermione is to her mom knowing everything. Because let's face it, with her daugher away for nine months, does she honestly think her mother does nothing? No! Her mother reads and rereads her letters and reads between the lines and reads the daily prophet and writes the Weasley's and gets her hands on every bit of information about Hermione's world she possibly can. Because it's not that Hermione's not responsible, it's just that in four years, she's gotten petrified, become friends with a convicted mass murderer, attacked teachers, almost gotten killed and become best friends with a boy hunted by a partially dead megalomanic who just won't die.
Yup, nothing to worry about.
*smirk* It's a very nice, very sweet story, in a slightly neurotic way that seems to run in the Granger family.
