Beans growing in the summer

It hasn’t been an easy summer for the Bean. I’ve been well, ill pretty much, for the past six weeks.You can read that here, if you like:

You are the Music

But that isn’t the point of writing here. This is about the Bean. She’s in summer session at her Montessori school. In the summer there is more time outside and visits from the people in your neighborhood, like firemen, policemen and such. It’s fun to hear her come home and tell me about what policemen do, how to call 911 and that she wants to be a firegirl when she grows up, if she isn’t a mermaid or a train conductor that is. She is a happy, well liked Bean and more social than we could have ever predicted, coming as she does from parents who are more at home in a library than a party.

I’d still have her home with me if she didn’t need other children so much. Shes so very interested in people, so very friendly. She coaxes a bit more extroversion out of us each time we go to the park, to the store,anywhere there are other children.

So she’s in Montessori learning about continents, insects (That’s not a bug, that’s an insect mommy. Insects have a head, thorax and abdomen and six legs. Spiders arent insects they are arachnids.) and the Ocean. She’s coming home dirty and sometimes grumpy from being so busy. We swim in our backyard pool, ok I float sitting on a small raft, and she practices going underwater and “jumping under water,” and we dig in the dirt when it isn’t too hot. Which it mostly is.

And we find the odd apple doesnt fall far from the strange tree.

Her favorite movies are the Corpse Bride and the Nightmare before Christmas. Occasionally these are supplanted by Lady and the Tramp and Kiki’s Delivery service.

She has two dolls she must sleep with :Shedney and Shen-po. She named them herself. One is a skellington bear , and the other a skellington cat, they are spooky. When she grows up she will be spooky too, she says.

Today she brought me a Japanese Beetle and told me it was a Japanese Beetle with a green carapace. And we think that Shen-po translates to fire demon. Um, not that she’d know that or anything, but it’s funny.

And when we asked her what she wanted to earn for two weeks of good behavior, no tantrums, no saying mean things, picking up her toys and the other good ways of being we want to encourage?

A trip to the library and a spooky doll.