Keeping Your Weights

The route Phoebe and I take from the car to her classroom involves walking along a sidewalk at the top of a small but steep hill. One day, since she likes to walk on the very edge of the sidewalk, she nearly fell down the hill into the rocky drainage ditch below.

"Oh," she said, relieved, "I kept my weights."

"Kept your weights?" I asked.

"Yes. Like Harold."

I realized that she was talking about the moment in Harold and the Purple Crayon when Harold is falling but "kept his wits and his purple crayon," allowing him to get himself out of trouble once again.

Reading to Baby

Phoebe likes to read to herself at night--and to her "baby" (who is required to use his paci).

I'm still crying

Once Phoebe managed to bite her own finger while eating spaghetti--so hard that she sobbed with those agonizing silent spaces in between cries. I held her in my arms until I thought she'd recovered. When I encouraged her to return to eating, she began to wail, "I'm still crying." It caught me as so hilarious that I began to cackle. At first this shocked her, and she went silent. Then she began to laugh too--but not without returning to the refrain, "I'm still crying," in between her giggles.

Threats and Observations Regarding Leafhoppers

• I'm going to put leafhoppers in your hair.
• That's not a car. That's a leafhopper.

Awesome Questions

• Is this beef or meat?
• What is a butt called?
• What word starts with "man"?
• Why do mans wear seat belts?
• Remember when I was a tiny baby, and I was stuck, and Daddy cut my belly button off?

I don't have words.

After one day back at school, Phoebe announced, "I'm a little bit sad, Mommy." When I asked her why, she said, "I don't have words." I asked her if she wanted a hug. She said no and continued sitting with her back to me on the little couch in her room. Finally--after telling me a rambling story about a time when I had been sad and she had tried to give me a toy (which I don't recall ever happening)--she told me, "I think I'm a little girl. But I'm in the big kids' class."

The Little Reader

This summer I read The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith. He argues that learning is natural and based on the company we keep. We learn to be readers by joining the literacy club, the group of people around us whom we see reading and talking about reading. The day after I'd been up nearly all night writing a reflection on the book for one of my reading classes (and was rushing Phoebe off to daycare so I could get to that class), I heard a little voice from the backseat asking me why I had been writing in my book. Before I could finish my gobbledygook about transacting with the text, she asked for the book and my pen. She opened it to the title page and drew me a balloon (upside down).