Thursday, September 15, 2005

My wonderful Leila

This morning Leila was stirring a bucket of chalk with a spoon. "I'm cooking," she told me. (She thinks stirring is cooking.) I looked at her multi-colored chalk and thought of the boring white chalk in my classroom. I took a green and a pink piece (because she had more) and asked her if I could take them to work. She said no. I took them anyway. When I opened my purse in the classroom, I found a piece of yellow chalk, too. What a sweet surprise.
Leila reminds me so much of the parable of the two sons: One said he wouldn't help his father and then did, and the other said he would and then didn't. She's at the age where she says no to everything, but then often does it.
One night we looked up at the moon. Leila said "Hi Tio Scott," which we'd done throughout the summer as he was in Moz and we were here. Then she said, "Tony star." Tony is a friend of ours through Scott. I was surprised to hear her make that connection because I don't think anyone had said that to her before.
Final thing: My brother-in-law used to say "I want a Winnebago and a condo on the beach" whenever anyone was whining about wanting something. I started saying the same thing to Leila when she would say she wanted something she couldn't have. Now when she's pleading "I want chocolate," I ask her, "What do i want?" and she replies "a beach." That's about right, too.

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