Box score

Edith at age 5:

44 lbs. (75th percentile)
42 3/4 inches (56th percentile)

Checks next to about a dozen skills listed as five-year-old skills, including counting to ten, telling a story using complete sentences (ha), drawing triangles, and hopping on one foot. Has yet to master tying a knot and doesn't know her address or phone number. Does anyone know phone numbers by heart anymore?

Interesting story about the triangles: I had been asked to look at the list of skills before the doctor came into the examining room and to make the appropriate checks next to them. I wasn't sure about the triangles and asked Edith. She shook her head and said no, she couldn't do it. I said I thought perhaps she could. She picked up a pencil and pad of paper on the desk and tried, showing me somewhat angrily that she couldn't get the last two sides of the triangle to meet. I drew an equilateral triangle on the page and asked if she could copy it. First she traced it, then she tried to copy it freehand and indeed came up with a triangle. It was isosceles, though, and she angrily said that she had failed. I assured her that it was a triangle, just a different-shaped one. I drew a few other isosceles and scalene triangles by way of examples to show her they all were legitimate triangles. She shook her head and threw the paper in the trash, wailing again that she couldn't do it. We were done.

About ten minutes later, in the middle of the exam, the pediatrician asked Edith if she could draw a triangle. Edith calmly picked up the pencil and the pad of paper as if for the first time that day and unhesitatingly drew an equilateral triangle. That, in a nutshell, might be the whole case against our homeschooling (even if we were so inclined).

Edith was lectured on eating fruits and vegetables every day, brushing teeth in the morning as well as the evening, and taking on some household responsibilities that benefit others, like setting the table. As far as I'm concerned, getting herself dressed, picking up her toys, and putting her clothes in the laundry serve the collective good better than table-setting, so we won't change the chore list for now.

She's very relieved to be done with shots until age ten. The nurse in the injection lab was brilliant: As Edith started to panic about the shots, she told Edith she had to give her a test to see if she was ready for kindergarten. With Edith facing away from her, she then proceeded to ask four questions, sneaking in a shot in the middle of Edith's answer each time. Not that Edith failed to notice, but she was concentrating so hard on answering that even as she winced, she continued to speak.

None of the medical staff was disturbed by the fact that Edith had grown a lemur tail, even though some were unfamiliar with the species. (Thanks, Aunt Robin.)

***

As for Alice, we've got sentences!

The first may have been, Eat waffle! Alice has developed a new love for toaster waffles (pronounced wah.FOO!), and she and Edith together have consumed 40 in the past ten days. Feel free to enter it on my Bad Mama record.

Other recognizable sentences, amid the steady stream of inflected babble, have included Daddy go walk and the ever-popular imperative, Read book.

She also appears to be on the cusp of running, jumping, and singing. And yes, she has started throwing a few limp-on-the-floor temper tantrums, too. The recompense for the exhaustion parents experience in a child's second year of life is how utterly amazing the transformations are.

***

Finally a few conversations I'd meant to post awhile ago.

TMI
In the car on the way home from preschool.

G: Edith, whose mother was that who was talking to me at school?

E: Who?

G: The mother of the little boy in Miss Kate's class with brown hair and big brown eyes, who came up and started talking to me. Is that Josiah? Is that Josiah's mom?

E: Of course that's Josiah's mom. If she didn't come pick up Josiah at the end of the day he would have to stay at school all night and sleep in the Cozy Corner, and when he asked for a drink of water, no one would be there to give it to him, and he would get very thirsty. Of course that was Josiah's mom.

A Measured Response
Like most preschoolers, Edith is given to exaggeration. "If I don't have a snack right now, I'm going to explode into a million pieces." That sort of thing. But this evening she went with understatement.

We were in the bathroom; she and Alice were bathing. Still rather fearful about fire, Edith suddenly asked,

"Mom, did you turn off the stove?"

"Yes, I did."

"Whew, that was a good idea."

"I try not to burn down the house."

"Good. Because otherwise, if everything burned to the ground, well when Daddy came home I think he would ask what happened.

"Yes, I think he would."

"And we would tell him that we had a house fire."

Pause. "Huh. Then what?"

"Then he would say, 'Oh, well that explains it.'"