4 and 1/2

It doesn't feel surprising that as of today, Edith is closer to 5 years old than 4 years old. She has been anticipating 5 for awhile. Five is when she'll be a flower girl for her cousin Kerri. Five is when she's going to Africa (more on that later). Five is when she's starting kindergarten, quite possibly at the school down the street where we vote and where we played on the playground this summer and visited the kindergarten rooms with a friend who teaches there. Edith already is acquainted with the giant stuffed giraffe at the entrance to the school, and if the academic job market continues in its slump and we remain in Princeton another year, Geoffrey the Giraffe will welcome Edith through the doors next September.

Meanwhile she starts to seem more like a school-aged kid to us all the time. She has grown tall, and 5 is the size I look for in clothing for her now. She loves devising projects, then following through with them. Here is she is walking on the tin-can stilts she wanted to make after hearing about them in one of the Ramona books. It took a month of patient waiting while Mommy and Daddy drank their way through two cans of coffee, then an afternoon's work with twine and a hammer. Learning to walk on them was the fastest part. Edith was satisfied that they made the kind of clanking noise on the sidewalk that Beverly Cleary describes--she relished it as much as Ramona.


She also is very interested in writing these days, asking us to help her sound out words so she can write cards, lists, and even stories. She doesn't want to try working things out on her own, but if we agree to stand there and help sound out words phoneme by phoneme, she has amazing patience and motivation to get it all down on paper. Interestingly, this interest has not translated into a desire to try sounding out printed words in books for reading purposes. I think she doesn't have the patience--open a book and she wants to hear the story NOW, however mind-numbing its "Cat sat on mat"-ness.

The other day her class read a Berenstain Bears book about manners, in which the Bears make a chart showing the penalties for not observing various rules of good etiquette. Edith was quite taken with this idea and wanted to devise a chart of our household rules and the penalties for breaking them. Here's what she came up with:


Note that Edith loves finding reasons to go into the attic, accessed by a fold-down ladder she finds intriguing. We don't use the attic for anything, even storage. Thus having to sweep the attic if one yells may not be all that dire a consequence... As parents, we prefer the more logical connection between dumping sand [out of one's shoes while in one's carseat] and cleaning the car.

But sand or no sand, it's fun to watch Edith come up with projects, fun to share yet more stories with her (children's versions of the Odyssey are her latest favorite), fun to tickle her funny bone, fun to watch her put our hugs and kisses away for safe keeping, fun to dress up and dance around the room. Four, five, halfway in between...we love it.