Schoooooool's Out! For! Beanie!

I remember absolutely loving preschool.  I have only vague memories of my time there, including: arguing with a boy on the playground who told me that I looked like a boy, most likely because of my ratty, cow-licked bowl cut; performing some role in an Ugly Duckling sort of play or recital at the end of the year; and reading a Berenstain Bears book to some classmates and getting stuck on the word "commotion." (I was an early reader, and a nerd, and I am still that kid.  For example, I'm blogging, and I get way too excited about the Sunday crossword puzzle.  And even though I had brief moments of street cred, you know, interning at Boston's "official #1 for hip-hop and R&B" during college the summer that they played The Fugees every twenty-seven minutes, last year I pronounced Flo Rida as Florida, and there you have it.)  Anyhow, yesterday was Marley's preschool show; it was sweet and precious, just as that sort of thing is meant to be.  Marley sat so attentively in her little blue chair, and I noticed only while looking through pictures later, her feet don't touch the ground.  From a preschool chair.  She.  Is.  A.  Peanut.

Now that Marley's finished her first official year of schooling, she can begin pursuing career paths in earnest.  She would like to be a ballet-er because they are beautiful and because "They NEVER wear pants!"  She's told Liz, Will's mom, that she will grow up to be a fairy.  She would also like to be a pirate.  When she's climbing pretty much anything at the playground, and rope ladders especially, she's being a pirate.  She frequently gets all chatty and excited about pirate hunts she's planning to concoct.  Today's hunt involved a piece of scrap paper dipped in water at one corner so that it would stick to the top step next to the corner pieces of her giant, foam puzzle of the world.  And that was the hunt, I think.  The entire, actual hunt probably occurs in her cute little brain, and I would love to know what that looks like.

We are going to have so much time for pirate hunts now that summer vacation is here, in all its gloomy, drizzly glory.  I think the sun is going to appear some time this weekend but it's been missing for too long and it is hard to be cheerful on the fifth gray, wet day of the week.  Here are two things that help.

1.  Watching Marley chant "Hey, Diddle, Diddle" with her class.  She has the focus and careful rocking of either a Tibetan monk or a National Spelling Bee contestant in the final rounds.

2.  Watching Marley fan a laminated blue circle while managing to look little-girl-bossy, nervous, and so over it all at the same time.  She is such a fantastic kid and I am so, so proud of her.