Child centred post

Compared to all our worthy compatriots in parenting blogland we are sometimes concerned we are not quite child centred enough. We do not hide our love under a bushel of humility, NOOOOOO! If we have not yet spoken of the amazingness of our offspring it is for one reason only. She is too amazing for words. And we don't want to, mmm, go all soccer parent here.

But today we will note a few great things about our Girl Friday:

1. She sings
What began as a bit of baa-baa-black sheep, transitioned to Ring-a-rosy now run the gamut from A-B-C to, appropriately, the Fables of my Street. She is good at singing, and I am not... but you could not overestimate the delight singing with her can bring to many many moments in our home. We now know there is little that cannot be overcome with a song.

2. Loves the cats
She means what she says. I wish I had captured the photo of E. with Dexter last week. She put sunglasses on him and then began to say "Hi cutie, I louuuvvve you"

Further, the Montessori types have me convinced I can get the offspring to pull down a goodly number of chores around 36 months. I dream of the day I hand over the sweeping and ironing to her; for now she does a really terrific job of pouring out the kibbles. It's adorableness in motion, 'eat it up Flippiter'

3. She love 'em da books
As a librarian and the world's best reader ever... Reading is pretty important around here. We have a truly splendid library for our girl to choose from and she loves her books. She reads widely and can actually recite the contents from the first three pages of Zen Shorts as a demand to have it read. BTW this book is the Wo family's children's book of the year!

4. She's friendly
Without this little girl we would not know one tenth of the people who live around here that we do now. When the first few words are all hellooo or HI! you gotta emerge from your own unfriendliness and go with it. We now have relationships with all kinds of neighbours, of course all the kid folks who like us shun any sort of organized kid activity in favour of shovel and bucket sharing on an as needed basis in the park... then there's the couple who own Good Dog Carl and the whippets, the senior Chinese couple who walk the park perimeter daily at 11, there's the East Indian gramma from the next block who pops us a Hello and a smile with every passing, the Portugese guy with all the concrete statuary and the very dear Tom, former mine employee with two sons, one a pharmacist now and the other in medical school. E. thinks he created running! So be it.

5. She puts up with us
I have already told some of you that one of our nurses remarked when E. was born: She is a very old soul. Our first thought was well great, we could really use a grown up around the house.

She is an amazing little human.