A Butterfly Net

This is the "new" look that transpired the other night in Maya's bedroom.

Note the lovely big Bratz poster on the wall. Posters for a four-year-old? Oh my, you betcha! When she unwrapped that poster Christmas Eve, you should have seen the look on her little face. All smiles, all smiles.

The netting above and that falls around her bed now is -according to my sources here - a butterfly princess net. I can't say I'd ever seen this around a small child's bed but Maya knew what it was when she opened the package that contained this present and it too, like the Bratz poster, made her eyes light up, big time.

Just how does a four-year-old learn about all these things anyway? It just amazes me how so much of what she picks up seems to come through via that old biology term -"osmosis." It just seeps in somehow and finds a home in that little sponge commonly called a brain. And trust me, hers really does soak EVERYTHING up these days - just exactly like the sponge does and just like the brain is also supposed to do.

She picked up a new sentence this week - well several actually but this one is the one that stood out to me. As we were getting ready to leave the house Sunday, she decided to pitch a fit with Mandy who merely wanted to change her clothes. Maya threw herself down on the bathroom floor, kicking about and said quite sternly to Mandy, "Leave. ME. Alone!" Hmmm - we're still trying to figure out where she heard that one.

Then a couple of days after that, one morning as Mandy was trying to bribe her to do something else, she told her she could do X if she picked up Y first - the "Y" being a mess of Barbie and Bratz dolls and their clothes and accessories that she had scattered all over the living room floor. It was a pretty big task, no doubt about it, but Maya had said ok to picking up this stuff and as she looked at the pile in front of her, we heard her say, in a very low, soft voice, "Oh shit!"

And now, there's a lot of finger-pointing going on here -from the sil to Mandy to me and back and forth -as to which one of us would happen to be the guilty party who said that and from whom Maya picked it up. Truth be told, it could very easily have been any of us but no doubt those who know me really well would probably be most inclined to point in my direction. I am probably the most forgetful about this business of watching my words and cussing under my breath instead of saying things out loud but it was kind of fun to hear Mandy and Bill each fess up to having said those words a time or two within Maya's earshot too.

But the biggest thing for me over the past week really has been in looking back over my posts of the past year, reading the things I wrote about - mainly pertaining to Maya - things she was learning and now, watching her, listening to her actually prattle on and on sometimes about different things and realizing how far she has come in those past 12 months. You really do have to be very cautious now if you're trying to do something and feel the need to pull the wool over her eyes in the process because she catches on very quickly now to so many things and you don't even realize a lot of the time that she is paying attention either.

We're starting to use the time honored technique of spelling out some words from time to time here and even that, sometimes maybe she just puts two and two together but there are times when she figures those things out too that we're trying to be so crafty and smarter than her, ya know! Where do we go once she learns how to spell then anyway?

But regardless of what she learns next, how quickly these transitions occur too, I'm just so grateful to be able to see them happen.

Gives a body something else to take heart in for her future ya know!