Date:

July 25th, 2003

25 Jul 2003, by

Sophia has started giving me her bears before she gets out of the car in the morning. She used to demand to take one with her, and often the battle was over which one (I always wanted her to take the most battered, beat up ones which had Sophia scrawled on the tag and she invariably wanted the newest, shiniest, cleanest of her animals which I hadn’t written her name on). We lost Ping the Duck in one such argument many months ago, as she won out and took him inside and he was never seen again. Yesterday she said, in a most businesslike matter, before she’d even let me take her out of the car seat, “Here, here, here. Take Trucker. Here.” So I took Trucker and put him in the front seat, and she went to daycare emptyhanded.


So on Wednesday I scheduled our haircuts together. Sophia has cried her way through all 4 of the haircuts she’s had thus far in life, and I figured if she could see me having it done also (I usually get mine done separately from her, though at the same place) then she would see that it was just normal stuff and be more acquiescent about it. She has been more enthused since she realized that suckers accompany H.C.’s but she still sobbed her way through the last hair cut about 8 weeks ago so I was trying to make things easier this time around. Well no sooner had I sat my behind in the chair and Lynn (our fantabulously awesome hair chick) started fastening the apron thing around my neck when Sophia came running over saying “Miiiiiiiiiine” and trying to push me out of the chair. “Sophia’s chair!” she exclaimed, and then, highly annoyed, “Get away! Get away! Get away!” So I had to let her go first. And she didn’t cry a single tear. She hardly even frowned. She told Lynn all about how she had been swimming with Deirdra and asked for her sucker. It was like getting a haircut had never bothered her.


This morning, as we stopped by the trees next to the daycare parking lot to look at them (we do this every morning, no matter how late I’m running, except in cases of inclement weather), she pointed across the playground. “Squirrel! Squirrel!” she said excitedly. I looked over and sure enough, a squirrel was darting around the ground. Moreover, a gorgeous bird of prey (a hawk, perhaps?) was harrying it, possibly deciding on squirrel meat for breakfast. Ooooooh, look at the bird! Isn’t it beautiful? I asked. Boooful, she agreed solemnly. As we walked inside some moments later I realized that she had used the word squirrel and correctly identified the animal, and I hadn’t even noticed that it was a word I hadn’t heard her use before.


These are the ways in which my child grows up, almost unnoticed, before my very eyes.

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