Background music: "Benjamin Franklin flying his kite
Was searching for...Electricity, Electricity."

"Benjamin Franklin is on the 100 dollar bill." Sophia exclaims.

"Yes. He is. That's exactly right," I say. Internally, I think,"Go school!"

"I learned that from Encyclopedia Brown," Sophia says.

I laugh. Encyclopedia Brown, you go, buddy!

Sophia just called me the meanest person in the world. Not for the first time. Because I wouldn't give her candy. That's me, non-candy-giving meanie.

Moments later she said she was going upstairs to read, and I suggested that she go ahead and brush her teeth and get in bed, to save herself the work later. She apparently thought this was a command from high, because she stood in front of me with her hands on her hips and declared,"I'm going upstairs. And I'm going to read. And I'm not going to brush my teeth first."

"Ok," I said, shrugging.

She smiled,"Thanks, mom! Thanks for not making me have to brush my teeth!"

"Oh wait. Does this mean I lose my title of meanest person in the world?"

"Moooooooooom."

"I'm serious. Can I keep my title?"

"No."

"Oh darn!"

"Don't worry mom, I'm sure you'll get it again on another day."

Yes. Without a doubt I will once again earn the title of meanest person in the world. I may soften from time to time, but that mean title belongs to ME!

I don't get to put much in the "Milestones" category these days. The first word, the first step, the first this or that of the early years gives way pretty quickly to things much harder to mark. You find yourself saying, "How long has she been using the word 'decline'?" and "Oh hey, she no longer writes Krut for Kurt." but you don't get the abrupt milestones, the turning points, the way you do when the kid is younger.

But yesterday we hit one. I've been giving Sophia an irregular allowance since she turned five. I've been paying her according to her interest in receiving it, so many weeks would pass without monetary exchange. At any rate, I obligated her to put some money aside for savings, and to keep some for spending. Yesterday we went down to our local credit union with what she had in the bucket I told her to put 'savings' into and opened a kids savings account.

She got a gumball at the credit union's free gumball machine as we left.

I told her that getting her own savings account was a big deal.

"That's strange," she said.

"What is?"

"Usually you say that things aren't a big deal."

"Ahhh. That's true. But this is a big deal.

So now my child has her very own savings account, with $86.09 in it. They gave her a piggy bank and everything. She was really excited and intrigued by the transaction register (in case anyone doubted that she was my child, there are my genes: she's fascinated by the transaction register). Today she asked me if we needed to write the date and how much money she had on the register, and I clarified that you only wrote on it when you made a deposit, and the amount of money you had in the bank changed. Then she wanted her allowance, then she wanted to put more than I normally force her to (a dollar, out of five) into the piggy bank for savings (she put in $1.50), then she asked for a transaction register for her piggy bank. I told her she could count that money any time she wanted to, which was not so easily accomplished with the money at the bank, and that's why we keep a tally of what we have deposited over there.

Next week she starts elementary school. She had been visiting the elementary classroom back in the spring semester. As we were walking down the street this week in U. City, she said to me,"When I visited the elementary I felt grown up. That made me happy."

In preparation for school the elementary kids make "Banners of Intention" detailing the things they have learned and the things they want to learn in the upcoming year. We worked on Sophia's for two days. Sophia decorated hers with a sun, a drawing of a horse, a drawing of a dinosaur, a drawing of herself cooking, a musical staff with the first few notes of "Mary had a little lamb" and some flowers. "The flowers can represent nature," she told me,"I want to learn more about nature."

How long has she been using the word "represent"? I wondered.

She is ready (and eager!) to go back to school. She feels happy. She correctly uses the word "represent". She has her own savings account. Really, what more could a parent want?

Sophia is reading! Well, sort of. Last week, while my husband was bathing her, she looked at the handles on the bathtub and sounded out "hot", "cold" and - best of all - "shower". Only she hasn't been taught the consonant digraph "sh" (or any others, for that matter), so she pronounced it more like "sour". That's the most notable instance of her unprompted reading thus far (a six letter word, not bad!). She does sometimes spell things out without reading them as she sees them written. She also sounds out very small words pretty regularly (like "hot"). Some of the latter is merely the beginnings of word recognition from the reading preparation works at Montessori school. Her directress (that's Montessori for teacher) reports that she's regularly working with three letter cards and four letter cards.

Still, even though she has probably seen "hot" among her three-letter cards at Montessori school daily for almost a month, and "cold" may or may not be among the four letter cards, we're both pretty certain she hasn't seen "shower" anywhere. In fact, Kurt was so suspicious of her spontaneous sounding out and then reading it (even with mispronunciation) that he quizzed me as to whether I had gone over it with her before. I had not (I would have explained the digraph if I had). I'm trying not to be pushy about the reading thing. Her teacher told us she would be getting some of the first reading lessons this semester and warned us to 1 - take it easy on Sophia and 2 - that she wouldn't give us daily progress reports about Sophia's reading skills to protect us all from too much pressure. Kurt followed up the exciting bathtub reading session a few days later by writing down some three letter words on a piece of paper (cup, pup, that kind of thing) and seeing how she did (very well, she read them all), but in general, we're just kind of letting her approach this as she wants to. Obviously she's not ready for "see spot run" or full on sentences from the Dick and Jane books yet, but neither is she four yet, so it still seems a very good sign. I'm very excited about this because I long for her to find the empowerment and freedom that reading has always given me.

One of the things I like to play with Sophia are simple math games. She knew how many sides a stop-sign has and that it was called an octagon shortly after she was speaking. However, two things of late merit a special mention. The other day after school Sophia was walking around in a circle and when Anna asked her what she was doing she said that she was 'walking an ellipse'.

So it was bath time and Sophia was drawing with some soap-crayons (thanks Aunt Kelly!) and she drew these circles and lines and asked me "Daddy? Which one is tangent? Which line touches the circle in two places? Which line doesn't touch the circle at all?"

I was so proud.

Today was the big day, Sophia's first day in the Montessori classroom. She had an abbreviated day today, and will for the rest of the week. I like the way they ease them into the program. They have all the returning kids back on Monday, then add in the new kids four at a time over the course of the week. She was very, very excited about it. I don't know how extensively I've commented about it here, but she was by turns very negative and very eager about it, with the negativity waning over the last week. At the open house on Friday, she was beside herself examining all the different works they have to choose from. They told us not to let the children touch anything, and I kind of wondered why they tormented the children by having them come in but not allowing them to interact with the things in the room, but it worked to our advantage in building a sense of anticipation in Sophia, so I guess they know what they are doing. This morning when Kurt asked her what she wanted for breakfast she told him she wanted to go to the Montessori school. Afterwards, she was walking around the house with me, carrying her Montessori school bag. She emptied out all the contents, including the little, soft, pink, ballet slippers. She tried them on and proclaimed them to be "Beautiful. Like Simone." and then peeled them off and put them back in the bag. I explained that she would wear those while in the classroom. She even let me brush her hair and put it into a partial ponytail so it wouldn't get in her way while she was at school.

She was a little reticent when I dropped her off. She was not clingy, and it was not the thought of separating from me that was making her anxious. Instead, it was the crowd of people and being outside instead of in the classroom that seemed to make her reluctant. The teachers had decided that the children would be more comfortable on the playground, and I'm sure that's true for 99.9 percent of all children, but Sophia had been carrying around the mental image of that lovely classroom with her all weekend, and she made a beeline for the building and told me she wasn't interested in going out on the playground. She walked along the outskirts of the playground, avoiding everyone. She's always been uncomfortable when first exposed to a new group of people. She likes to stay back and observe, and today was no exception. I finally coaxed her over to the areas where the teachers were. I kissed and hugged her goodbye and when I left her she was running back towards the building again, trying to get to the classroom and the shelves, where she knew there were things waiting for her to touch and experiment with.

When I picked her up, she declared that she was not coming back tomorrow. The teacher said she hoped Sophia would reconsider, since they had had such a good time today. I queried Sophia further on her reluctance to go back and she declared that she did not like any of her teachers and did not have any friends, and thus had no interest in returning. I asked her if there had been other new children today and she said that yes, there had been. I asked her if those people had friends and she told me they didn't. I told her that it takes time to make friends when going to a new place and that maybe some of the new people would be her friends. She thought about this and agreed that this might be so, but didn't think it was enough of a motivation to return tomorrow. I then asked her if she'd had an opportunity to explore all the classroom materials, or if there were perhaps some things she hadn't gotten a chance to work with. She told me that she had not, in fact, worked with everything. I asked her then, whether it was possible that she might like to come back tomorrow and work with some of those other things. She agreed that this would be a good idea.

Today Sophia graduated to "big kid" toothpaste. A scant half hour ago, for the first time, she carefully squeezed out a pea-sized dollop of flouride toothpaste onto her toothbrush, ran it along her teeth, rinsed it out and proclaimed it to be "spicy".

Sophia has been helping me build the Hogwart's Castle set I got from her for my birthday. She's fascinated by it, and helps me find the parts I'm looking for, helps me attach some of the pieces together and tells me she's going to "Put the lady with the hat in the attic, when you've built it." She gets the booklet from the set out and says "This is a book about how to build things." As I very often find myself saying to her I reply, "Yes, yes it is." Yesterday she helped me with the clock tower part, putting the face of the clock on the front of the tower and setting an "owl on each step, two steps" to roost inside the top of it. When we're working on this together, she demonstrates that remarkable attention span we've always marveled at. She'll sit with me, browsing through the pieces or holding the little lego people for an hour or more. She talks to me when she does this and is on her very best manners, as if she knows that building the set with me is a privilege and that if she misbehaves she can be banished at a moment's notice. She asks me very politely if she can remove pieces from the bag before doing so and asks me if she can look at the book or the various constructed parts before touching them. She also helps me clean it all up when it's time to stop building. She's very respectful and serious about the project, which pleases me. We talk together with anticipation about working on the next portion of the castle.

I am having so much fun doing this with her. I was tentative at first, feeling as though I would be picking up after her and distracted by her and not really able to finish the thing while she was with me, but it has not turned out to be that way at all. Kurt even tried to get her to go do something else when I started, fearing that it would be frustrating for me to try and work on it with her around. She refused to be redirected, though, because she was so interested in what I was doing. She has surpassed our expectations with her cooperativeness and interest. It's a complete pleasure to let her help me. It is the sort of thing I had dreamed to be one day doing with her before I had her. It's not just wholesome fun either, it teaches her all kinds of skills : sorting, matching, spatial awareness, visualization, the concept of a task taking several intervals to complete and the satisfaction of completing a task of that sort. Building this with me has renewed her interest in her own legos and building things on her own as well, giving her creative opportunities to make her own things.

Legos rule. And so does Sophia.

Hanging over Simone's crib, which used to be Sophia's crib, is a Sassy Mobile that was given to us as a baby gift when I was expecting Sophia (thanks, Julie!). This week Simone has started to become interested in it. She'll watch it for 5 to 10 minutes, following the slow rotation of the colored items and cooing at it. Sometimes, it gets pretty exciting and she starts waving her arms and kicking her legs while looking at it. We've arrived at the point where part of my job is entertaining her. At first, my responsibilities included feeding her, caring for her and soothing her. Now, as her nervous system matures and her brain grows, she begins to show interest in different things and every once in a while a certain boredom from lack of stimulation. Like Sophia was, and possibly all babies are, she's fascinated by ceiling fans. I don't know what people do in areas of the country where there aren't ceiling fans in every room. Sometimes she's restless and fussy and all I have to do is park her on my lap underneath a ceiling fan and she'll still and stare at it with complete fascination. It doesn't even necessarily have to be spinning. She just watches for minute after minute. What are you looking at, little bunny?

Yesterday Simone had her very first bottle! Dad fed the little one in the evening and she did not protest or struggle at all. It was all good, as far as she was concerned. This very important milestone opens the door for Simone and her mother to be untethered for longer than two hours, so it's very important indeed!