The Coolest Kid in the Class

When I first started this blog, I wrote about how my hopes for Isabel being "cool" (as I defined it) were being replaced with the realization that she, at then three, defined cool in a very different way. Well, shiver me timbers, the kid is changing again and is developing a cool streak larger and deeper than I could have imagined.

I should warn you that my idea of cool may be much different than anyone else's. But Izzy is learning to wrap her bubble gum pink around a stark sense of realism that is at once surprising and yet, as I said too many times already, very cool. Take, for example, the Izzy-ceratops that she drew for a school project last week. Izzy and her classmates were asked to imagine themselves as dinosaurs and then draw a picture of what they might be doing. Inevitably, the girls in her class couldn't do it, so they drew themselves "cute," usually involving eggs or simply as they are as people. Izzy relished the project and drew herself as a dinosaur as well as Ryan and I and Lottie who had yet to hatch. My favorite part, tho, was my role in this picture. I was off cooking dinner. When her teacher asked what I was cooking, she said, "People stew, of course." The other day I asked her if she enjoyed her salisbury steak for lunch and she replied, "actually mom, I had cow for lunch." Um, ok, so you did.

Her realism is also accompanied by a new sense of compassion, which is in itself very cool as well. She told me very solemnly over the weekend as I was trying to get us home without vomiting on myself again that it was Lottie's and her job to take care of me while I was sick. And then she encouraged her sister to sing a little song with her to take my mind off being sick.

Where did this little person come from? Don't get me wrong, she's not 4 going on 40 quite yet. This flashes of brilliance are still mixed in with random yelling and talking in a language that I can only describe as being comparable to the black Smurf disease (i.e., "GNAP"). But I really like this little person. At the risk of sounding a bit off, it's one thing to love your kids, and another to like them in the toddler stage when the goofiness is so fetching, but it's quite another thing to like them when they have budding personalities. Izzy is becoming someone I'd really like to know. And I hope she feels the same about me.