It's a small world after all

The stars have aligned for funny coincidences this week, largely through Edith's daycare:

First, I found out a full month into the new schoolyear that Kate, the mother of the new little girl in Edith's class, Sarah, who moved with her family into the building next to us but whose parents I hadn't yet met, turns out to be Kate from my residential college at Yale. I recognized her as someone I knew the minute I saw her and took another few minutes to place her. She was two years ahead of me and in charge of JE intramurals. I re-introduced myself, and we had a fun time catching up. Edith and Sarah, as well as another new little girl, Katherine, all are about the same height and have the same little bobbed blond heads. You really have to get down and peer into their faces to see which is which when they're all milling about at school. The head teacher emails us all digital photos from school every few days, and Kate told me that for the first few weeks, she thought Sarah was appearing in quite a high percentage of the pictures...until she noticed that Sarah appeared twice in one picture.

The next coincidence was when I got an email from my friend Kinnari in Oregon on which a number of people were cc'd. I wondered why Kinnari was emailing Edith's daycare teacher. It turns out that Edith's teacher and Kinnari's sister have exactly the same name.

Finally, completely unrelated to Edith but in line with these other small-world occurrences, I was listening to one of my Egyptian neighbors talk on the shuttle bus about how he came to study Old Testament theology. He cited one of his seminary teachers in Cairo as the most profound influence on him--someone with the same name as my favorite TA when I was an undergraduate, a student of early Christian history who moved to Cairo to take a teaching position shortly after I was in his class. Yep, same person.

But to get back to daycare. In the Maybe the World is a Little Too Small for This Scheme category:

It turns out that show-and-share at Edith's daycare is to proceed alphabetically. As part of the class's study of a letter a week, they are each supposed to bring in something on Friday that begins with that week's letter.

The challenge is the great variability in number of items beginning with each letter that the average toddler is likely to have. The first week, Edith brought in one of several toy airplanes being shown. The next week, by contrast, I realized that we really could milk B for at least a month of show-and-shares. Oh, the dilemma. Should Edith bring a

baby
ball
basket
bear
blocks
box (of barrettes and bows)
bucket
bulldozer
bus
or any one of her beloved books?

Thought she was, in fact, reading Benjamin Bunny that morning, we thought that a miniature book might be a bit tricky to show to the whole class. She opted instead for Blueberries for Sal. Harrison, who did in fact bring a bulldozer, apparently was waffling between the various types of vehicles on which he is expert and almost went with a backhoe loader instead.

C offered a more limited set of choices again but wasn't impossible, and Edith headed off with a toy cow this morning.

I'm already looking ahead a couple of weeks and am glad we named her Edith and that people have given her a number of items with her name on them. If she brings her Edith puzzle, it may mean that Elmo gets shown only ten times instead of eleven.


And in the "...Smile Means Friendship to Everyone" category:

Edith has a little puzzle featuring children from all around the world saying hello in different languages. The other day she picked up one of her favorite pieces and smiled. I suspect she likes it because the girl is wearing a pretty pink headscarf.

"Salaam," she said, and put it in place.

Then she started searching around and asked, "Where's shalom?"

She found the little boy with the skullcap and prayer shawl and put him in place, too. Then she smiled.

"They sound the same. I think they must be friends."

From the mouths of babes. If only, Edith.