Announcement for Chapter 10: 12/7/02

Announcing the latest updateto Sarah's website, "Chapter 10: Preschooler-In-Training"! There are 17 new pictures [age 23 - 27 months] from July through yesterday, plus a link to Ron's website with 9 more photos he took on his last visit here in October.

Sarah is so tall and articulate she hardly seems like a toddler anymore. She informed us she is tired of the toddler room at daycare, and she really wants to be in the preschool with the big kids, whom she watches wistfully over the fence. It's like having a high-school senior, so sophisticated and jaded amidst these mere children; yet so soon she'll seem so young and innocent as she enters the preschool maelstrom with twice as many kids up to twice her age. But she's raring to go. When the handsome young man cutting her hair conversationally asked her age, she carefully sized him up before replying sweetly, "Five." Both Els and I instantly envisioned her 10 years hence replying to some boy in the same tone, "Eighteen" --without her moms there to correct her. She's a live wire, this one.

She's very independent in both action and mind. She likes to do it herself: open things, close things, get in and out of the car. She'd even like to drive the car, but acknowledges that her legs (long for her size and age) are in fact still too short to reach the pedals.

She loves to draw, read and sing. Her sweeping abstract murals in washable crayon redecorate the bathtub wall nightly. Her singing has coalesced rapidly from a drunken sailor's lusty abandon to recognizable tunes and lyrics -- she remembers them remarkably well, and also quotes from the many books she reads. We read to her, and she reads aloud to herself, retelling the story as she flips the pages. She's just become interested in holding conversations between her puppets, and also obsessed with taking the little passengers and engineers on and off her new train set: "Next stop! Everybody off! All Aboard!" She's always fascinated with people and families. She adores her friends, and often asks about her many family members. She loves to hear and see stories and photos of herself as a baby, a time which seems impossibly long ago to her and sometimes even to us.

We remain her better-rested but still bedazzled and lucky moms.