This child

If you are a long time reader, then you are familiar with L.'s rather strong and unique personality. She was an easily frustrated baby and toddler, which didn't always make for easy parenting. I had a feeling when she was very little that there was just a lot going on inside her head, and it was frustrating to not be able to do anything about it. As she got older, this very definitely proved to be the case. There is a lot going on inside that head of hers.

Reading has been the very best thing for L. Here is a picture I took of her earlier today as she was reading.

I know, it doesn't look comfortable, but she was quite happy. Being able to read as many stories as she wants to hear has been wonderful. I used to have to travel with books because when life got to be too much for her only a listening to a story would bring her back from the brink of total meltdown.

Of course, being able to read also fills her head with even more ideas... for better or for worse. Take her Christmas gift, for example. What she wanted were plastic animals. You know, the really expensive German kind. She will play with them endlessly, making up elaborate stories for their adventures. To make the few animals I could afford a little more interesting, I bought an unfinished wooden box to hold them in. I figured that she would love to paint the box, and I was right. She knew exactly how she wanted to paint it, with undersea scenes from prehistoric oceans, to match her dinosaurs. Sounds great, huh?

Well, in all of our dinosaur books, it seems we have no decent illustrations of prehistoric oceans. It was frustrating. Over the course of several days, I heard about exactly how frustrating it was. Which is why, one afternoon after Christmas, as I was running errands, I stopped into the library and checked out a huge stack of books that could possibly fill her information need. I guess I found some decent books because here is the final product.

I might be able to keep up if L. confined herself to topic. We are all still adroitly avoiding having to proofread her 12+ pages of notes she took while watching a long documentary on American history. She reminds us about it every now and then. Usually I can put her off by offering her another documentary to watch. As long as she doesn't decide to take notes we're good.

Clay has also been a current area of interest. TM bought her some as a Christmas gift because she can never have enough. I have to admit I was pretty astounded at what she has created with it.

Take a look at these little heads. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the amount of detail is amazing. I put a pen next to them in the next picture to give you a sense of scale. They're pretty small.

Then yesterday, L. decided she was going to teach a clay class and enrolled G. I think she had a whole syllabus based on the conversations I heard snatches of. Then G. came down to show me what she had made in her clay class. It would seem they really were doing something.

Finally, if you're not tired of my little L. show-and-tell, and I want to show you what she created for J. for Christmas. She had wrapped a very large flat rock in ribbon and there was also a wrapped box to open. Inside the box were these.

A dragon,

and a knight.

This is the front view of the dragon. I realize it's a little hard to make sense of what you're seeing.

Now, this alone wouldn't really need to be put on the blog, but when you add the instruction manual that came with the knight and dragon set, well... (I'll interpret the not always obvious spelling.)