Of school, no school, knowledge and ignorance

Guess who climbed the Incline yesterday?!

I think she was the second-youngest climber on the trail. (Right at the start we bumped into our neighbor, who runs up the Incline every Thursday, taking her kids for their first go at it. Her daughter is a month younger than Edith.) Actually, I never planned for us to climb. I just wanted to get out of the house for a brief hike before beginning the day's errands and thought I'd get Edith to try the beginning stretches of the Barr Trail with me. But before we started I proposed just showing her the Incline, which starts several hundred yards from the Barr trailhead. We climbed up there and snapped a picture...and then Edith turned around and started climbing. I thought she'd go just a few yards, but she paused for a rest...then went further...then paused...then went further...and suddenly we were really climbing the Incline. She went much slower than most people on the trail, which meant that I was never out of breath and could tell her a story to keep her entertained. 

And so we made it to the first unofficial "ending" point: the place where the Incline and the Barr Trail come so close together that you can cross over from the one to the other. It comes just as the Incline is getting scary steep (hand-over-hand climbing), right before the false summit that dashes spirits. Plenty of people find it a good place to move over to the Barr Trail and come back down more gradually, for a 2.2 mile loop, 1,100 feet elevation gain.

Edith was pretty pooped by bedtime, but she never once whined along the way. And guess who is hobbling today and who doesn't feel a thing?

***

We've had some other good times over spring break, as Edith continues her streak of non-school days. (She's attended just one full, five-day week of school since Christmas and won't have another until April, since they're off for teacher conferences next week. Grrr.) We did some research into Front Range gardening, opting for help from live people and real gardens when the books were too overwhelming, and have tried to start lupine, spearmint, and sungold tomatoes (our favorite veggie from New Jersey CSA days) from seed in our basement bathroom. It's been so warm, we originally were planning to plant three of the raised beds we inherited out back, but the local nursery guy told us you can't put anything in the ground here until May 1, as April is when we may get our heaviest snows of the season. He also told us that there are virtually no deer-proof plants (though he gave us a list of some that have a better shot of making it than others), and when I asked, he directed us toward drought-friendly species. I've always thought of gardening as an inherently virtuous activity--one in which you can't overindulge, that is always for the moral good. But I wonder if that's the case in a place with 15 inches of rainfall a year, a severe drought, and a 3-4 month growing season. Is it legit to try to make the (mountainside) desert bloom?

Less ambiguously, we spent a happy afternoon in the garage painting a little unfinished bookcase that I bought for toys when Edith was an infant and that I have been intending to paint for nearly 6 years now. Life intervened--but it's much more fun-looking for our having waited until Edith could do the decorating work herself.

***

Today, we made a trip to the downtown public library, where Edith loaded up on Lois Lowry and Mary Pope Osborne books. We read the first Magic Treehouse book over lunch. These days we try to shift some of the reading responsibility to Edith in a way that won't frustrate or discourage her. She still doesn't like to slow down to work at reading when it's story time and will balk if you appear to be asking her too read too much of the page. So we have her read the chapter titles, captions, and anything inset in bold or a different font.

And yesterday we may have stumbled on a new strategy. We got a picture book (Dooby Dooby Moo by Doreen Cronin) from the used bookstore next to SuperCuts, where we were 7th in line, and after I read it once to Edith in the morning, she read it all by herself to Alice in the evening. At first she just started reciting it as she remembered it, but when she found herself forgetting, she started to look at the words, and soon she was trying faithfully to read all of those rather than just recall the story. But recall no doubt helped her with the tougher parts. When Tom came home she again read it to him, enthusiastic to share how funny it was. So we'll have to slip in some other funny, simple picture books that way.

***

Given how much an almost-six year old seems to know, I'm sometimes caught off-guard by what she doesn't know. Yesterday morning she was lying in bed with me while NPR reported the death of Elizabeth Taylor. (Edith loves National Velvet, and the audio clip from that movie caught her attention.) The report went on to mention Taylor's later life, including her eight marriages.

"Did all her husbands except the last one die?" asked Edith incredulously.

I told her no, that I was pretty sure Taylor got divorced from some of them. Edith looked blank.

"Do you know what divorce is?" I asked.

No. No idea. Obviously troubled to hear an explanation, no matter how gentle I tried to make it. You can't make it too gentle (hard to reassure her that it almost never happens, for example.) I was surprised she hadn't run into the concept before.

***

Alice meanwhile has continued in daycare all week (we're paying for it regardless, and her being at school makes it much easier to do interesting things with Edith). Perhaps as a result, she knows everything these days.

"Hey, Edie, guess what? Chicken butt! Asher says that."

We hear a lot about other kids from Alice. She prays for each of her neighborhood friends every night at dinner time. If we ask who she played with at daycare we get a detailed list:

"I play with Marie. Marie was there. Gabby was there. Asher was there. Lexi not there today. Riley went home with her grandma. What they doing? Maybe eating dinner."

Other kids feature in spontaneous accounts of her day:

"Today I say 'Guess what? Chicken butt!' to Asher, but he not hear me."

"Henry knock me down. He fall on me, and Miss Emma say, 'Henry, get off Alice. Say sorry.'"

Whenever we're outside Alice checks in with whichever neighbor kids are out, going over to each one, saying hi, and telling them about her doings--usually to the befuddlement and blank stares of these considerably older children. She doesn't mind. When she saw a flash of jump rope appear repeatedly over the top of the neighbors' fence yesterday, she demanded that I take her over to see what was going on. I did, and she stood transfixed for half an hour as a bunch of kids (and moms) practiced their jumping. She declined the mothers' offers to let her join in, but as soon as we got home, she launched into all the jumping rhymes she'd just heard.

She nearly melted my heart the other morning, when she sat up between me and Tom at 5:45 am, put an arm around each of us, and announced, 

"You my best friends." She then went on to explain: "Riley wants be best friends with Lexi. Henry not have a best friend. I want be best friends with Lexi at school, too." [Ed. note: Lexi is 3 and 1/2  and way cool.] I didn't mind competing with Lexi; I was exclaiming over how sweet Alice was in declaring us her best friends. Then, leaning over me and continuing to smile sweetly, she murmured, "Get up and make breffast, best friend?"