Monday, October 29, 2007

Watching a mind open up

Tessa is in a growth spurt. In addition to growing two inches between April and September (she's 42 inches now), her mind is just blossoming before my eyes. I'm watching it in her peers, too: as they approach five years old, they seem to just take off, absorbing so much more than before, with so many things just clicking.

Sometimes, this means that I'm awestruck by her creativity, awareness, and knowledge; sometimes it means unwieldy meltdowns that leave me more dumbfounded than awestruck. I truly believe that the poor kid can't keep up with herself right now, and she just melts down as a result.

Right now, she's upstairs, transcribing the names of her friends, which I've written on a piece of paper. I wrote perhaps a dozen names down in upper and lower case, and she is actually able to read them. Now, she knows that it's a list of names of people she knows, so she has that very good clue, but she's able to differentiate between Elena and Emma or Lexi and Liam, and this surprises me. Needless to say, it also delights me. Ryan and I love to read, and try to read every day, and watching our daughter develop a love of reading as well fills me with happiness.

(In addition to loving that she loves something near and dear to me, it eases my heart to think that she'll have a bit more ease at school if she considers herself a reader....it just paves the way for so much. I don't care if she's a straight A student, but I do hope that she'll enjoy school and enjoy learning, and reading is such an important part of that.)

Speaking of reading, I need to read my bookclub book by Thursday. It's short, but it's a murder mystery, so I've been holding off....my all too active imagination can't handle murder stories very well and with the darkness of my mood and thoughts I haven't looked forward to this. It's a local author, though, and I'm enjoying the prospect of bookclub in general.

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