We take two to college this weekend, so it is difficult this week not to think much about the past eighteen years.Where has the time gone?!
My son is "old hat" at this college routine, but this is the first time for my daughter. I have so many memories. Many of them this week have centered around the time she was three and four - the age when she really became verbal and her creativity started to blossom.
She became very adept at writing the numbers to twelve. When we asked her to write thirteen she replied "I can't - it's not on the clock."
She had a little pair of pink pants with orange polka dots that she absolutely loved. For some unknown reason she called them her "joy-joy pants." We tried in vain to figure out where she got that term and never did. But her beloved joy-joy pants were her favorite until she got too big for them. Once at a yard sale I found the matching top to her joy-joy pants and that made her happy also.
She loved games and was extremely competitive, even at a very young age. Some games were a bit of a trial for an adult to play repeatedly, but Memory was one that she could be successful at, yet I could play it with her and still be somewhat challenged myself. Once I had to stop the game to go to the kitchen to check something in the oven. I glanced over the counter from the kitchen to the den, and saw her furiously checking tiles as fast as she could before I returned. So we had a perfect opportunity to discuss the concept of "cheating" and what that meant!She was writing a "journal" by the time she was four. Everything in it was phonetic and required a translation on the next page by me, so that now we can understand what she was saying. Sometime I will post some of her very creative spellings - yet the meaning of what she was trying to say made perfect sense, as did her phonetics.
When she was two, we wondered when she would start talking. The Christmas of that year, she kept repeating "ti-ti-tee" over and over. It seemed like a meaningless repetition - until we realized she was saying "Christmas tree" in her limited way.-
A year or two after that, we rode to school one morning - a twenty-minute one-way ride - and neither Andrew or I said a word the entire time. We couldn't get one in.
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All she ever needed for entertainment was a stack of paper and some pencils, markers, and/or crayons, and she was content for multiple hours.
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She was always good for a smile and was a big encouragement to her mother many times.
3 comments:
OK, you've made a very proud aunt sit at her desk and cry this morning. I remember loving to read her journal.
You also did a smart thing when you wrote one sentence a day for the first year or two of the kids lives on a calendar of that day's events rather than trying to keep long records in a baby book. That was fun to read as well.
Love you Mary Lee.
Of course, I love the pics and the memories, but this is to comment on the third (last) picture. Mary Lee is wearing the long dress that her mother wore for the Athens sesquicentennial in the late 1960's. That conjures memories of the old-fashioned costumes you and your siblings wore for the event.
It's sometimes hard and/or scary when you hit these landmarks. A whold new world is opening up for her and yours must feel like it's shrinking. But you raised them right, so they will always be there and bring you blessings!
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