Hannah Fannah Po Pannah

Some days it seems like Hannah is growing up in one of those nature films with the action speeded up. We let her ride the bus into town with her friend recently (after a test run of riding alone to meet me at the bus stop), and they only went a little out of bounds (of course, that means next time we say ‘no’). She has her own set of house keys, and we can trust her not to lose them and to use the crosswalk alone to go to her friends’ houses on our street. And she cleaned her room all by herself last weekend with only a little prodding/threatening from John.

But then other days I can still see the little kid in her. Now that she’s on summer vacation, we can catch the morning programming on Nick; she still talks back to Blue’s Clues and Dora the Explorer. She sometimes takes her doll to the store, but only in the stroller, not in the grocery cart. And she rereads her beginner reader books at bedtime.

And there are some things that are just pure Hannah. Like the game she invented with her dad: I didn’t catch all the rules, as I was weeding out my email, but it involved dice, little toys as place-markers, our tile floor, play money, and claiming and naming floor tiles/countries. It was the map game.






After watching Dungeons and Dragons with us last night (I will never get those brain cells back), she started a “What I Did on Summer Vacation” essay: “I watched a film, and at the beginning it was pretty bad, but the ending was good.” Despite declaring that she does not want to attend Swedish school next year, she said that maybe they could use it in their mini-newspaper they put out twice a year.

She has also declared that she doesn’t want to attend ballet, yet when we leave her lessons, she dances all the way to the car, doing fancy jumps and twirls. Next year she will get to wear a black leotard instead of the pink with the ruffle on the butt, but even that has not been much of an enticement. Her class has two boys in it, and they recently started lifts (well, the girls are jumping and spinning, and the boys give them a little boost as they go by), which Hannah really seemed to enjoy, so maybe I can remind her of that when the *agony* of going back to lessons seems too much for her in September.

When we first made our plans to go to Sweden for a week of vacation, Hannah was adamantly against it. On principle, I think. But we dangled the sweet, sweet carrot of a trip to Astrid Lindgren’s World and to Legoland (the original in Denmark!), and she has come around. To the point that she has already started packing, even though we aren’t leaving for 3 weeks. At least she’ll be well-prepared to entertain herself in the car, if she can even carry her suitcase by then.