Trickster

For quite some time, J was not enjoying listening to Enki 1st grade fairy tales and I could not, for the life of me, figure out why. After that incident over the choir project, I had a lot of moms giving me their perspective and trying to help me. They thought perhaps J should be Kinder and that she is really not ready for 1st grade material. They definitely have reasons to believe that as J wants to play a lot, do stuff on her own a lot. Plus she really didn't enjoy the Enki fairy tales even though it should mirror her developmentally. Shorter fairy tales she was okay with, but the longer one she really didn't like.

Needless to say, I was very confused. A few days ago, on a hunch or similar sort, I asked for recommendation to trickster stories. Those are suppose to mirror 2nd graders developmentally. We borrowed some trickster books from the library yesterday and J LOVED it. She read them repeatedly and asked for more books like that. Well, I still wasn't sure if that meant anything. And I let the question just hang in there.

This morning, the revelation came to me. J is ready for 2nd grade and has been a while. Now that I think back, I realized for her, she loved fairy tales most in late preschool and for the most parts while she was in Kinder. She actually did 1st grade academic stuff while she was in preschool. She knew all her alphabets (lower and upper case), how to write all of them, knew when to use them and had beautiful hand writing. By kindergarten, she was reading on her own and her reading level shot up very fast. Her teacher commented that J is an extremely strong reader. At the time, I must be very inexperienced, I thought that was normal. Okay, maybe little bit ahead, but certainly not that ahead.

Anyway, it was such a revelation to me. I cannot believe I didn't see it. She kept telling me that in her own way and I just didn't see it.

I'm still doing child study and just observing her. Today, her big question to me, how did people make music?
She has been loving my Andrea Bocelli cd. I don't understand what it says but I just love the sounds and the melody.

We went to a food co-op today. They also had a little cafe and we had a nice lunch there. I'm still trying to find an herbal place. I know it exists; I just had to find it. We bought some huge organic pumpkin seeds since J wants to plant pumpkin and we also got some perennials seeds. :) Later she said, "mommy, did you know that we have hair everywhere except our palm, the bottom of lip and our lips." Really?

So far, it is a great day for us. I'm just so happy that I understand J a little better now.