Recently Mary has become obsessed with letters and writing. I credit this newfound hobby to kindergarten and her phenomenally creative and motivating teacher. I also credit it to Mary deciding she wants to know letters, because Mary does not learn things that she does not want to learn. Not for her phenomenally creative and motivating preschool teachers. Definitely not for her phenomenally creative and motivating mother (who, admittedly, could use some work in the patience department).
Mary will solve global warming, cure the common cold, and invent a perpetual motion machine she’s good and ready BUT NOT BEFORE.
Letters? She’s ready now.
Now that she’s interested in writing, Mary constantly asks me how to spell things. I remember enjoying this phase when David went through it not long ago. It was different with David, though; David and Mary do everything differently.
When David was doing this, he’d ask me to spell single words as he labeled things or wrote titles on his drawings. And Mary? We tell her tall tales of how she came out of the womb talking, how she was speaking in paragraphs when most kids her age were working on words like “hi.” Her writing is the exact same.
Pencil poised above paper, she asks me, “Mommy, how do you spell — I love you when the breeze goes by, I love you when the bunnies jump high, I love you when the spring goes by. I love you, David, you’re my brother.”
Other Mommy-how-do-you-spells:
“Anna you are our future, Anna you are our star.”
“The mystery of the lost keys.”
“All was quiet in the barn yard one night.”
You always refer to her as “Mary Virginia.” When you use only her first name, it seems as though it is an entirely different child.
As horrifying as I find it, our paper had an article about the demise of writing, period. Many schools no longer teach cursive, but, apparently, printing is seen as useless with fingerprint identification and the use of computers.
she’s asked me to start calling her mary, so i try to respect that 🙂 but old habits die hard!