Last week we were invited to come celebrate the work that Mira’s first grade class has done this semester.  Peeks into her classroom life are always fun, but this one was doubly so since we had been out of town for the winter celebration.

We were led through their frog study details: Can you spot the frog hopping?  Catching flies?  Mira showed us her non-fiction book study (Air), too, and all the meanwhile I tried to take in the details of what she has been doing as a first grader.  She shares so much with us about what her days are like.  She came home excited about the jack-in-the-box made out of an old Kleenex container she and two friends gleaned from the classroom.  It was a present for her first-time-mother-to-be teacher.  She cried about the boy with a crush who was bullying her.  She didn’t crush back, but she wanted to be a good friend to him.  She worried about little problems with her friends and also laughed like crazy remembering that some of her guy friends had pulled their pants down in the lunchroom just a year before.

“They were so crazy then!”

She has read and read and read and fallen in love with it.  So much like her mama in that way.  She writes, too.  I see the way she works through her problems or concerns through her writing as she has always done with her drawing.  Now there they are, side by side: The story and its imagery.

“How do you spell ‘freaking’ as in ‘freaking out'”?

“The jinx machine is out of order.  Take it back, or pay a quarter!”

“Papa-paparazzi!”

How do these years go so fast?  Hop!  And, I am left trying to carefully measure just how far my biggest little girl has leapt.