Fat Rat

Is this not just everything a school photo should be? Slightly awkward smile, one wayward bow, complete adorableness that simply cannot be matched? I submit that this is picture perfect.

Jane continues to amaze and impress me with her quick learning at school. Her teacher gave me a report of her beginning of the year test scores. She is fairly average on everything, except two categories in which she scored far beyond where she should be by the end of the year. Any guesses?

Social Skills

and

Oral Language

Big surprise, huh? What actually surprised me, though, was a little game we played today. We have a large puzzle consisting of alphabet blocks. Jane was spelling out names and words--I told her the letter, she found the appropriate block. I ventured to get a little more complicated and started telling her sounds instead of letters, and she still managed to spell everything correctly. To end our game, we ran through quite a few -at words, just switching the starting letters...cat, sat, hat, rat, mat, etc.

Hours later, we had this conversation.

Jane: 

"Mom, you can't carry me because I am too heavy. Dad has to carry me. But I can't carry you because grown-ups are HUGE."

Me: 

"Are you calling me fat?"

Jane: 

"No, you're a rat!"  

(she exclaimed this very enthusiastically)

Me: 

"What?"

Jane:

"If you take fat and take off the F and put on an R then you're a rat!"

Just this once, babe, I'll let you call me a rat. But just because you're three and it's pretty dang amazing that you can figure that out in your head several hours after we were playing with a puzzle. And because your picture makes me giggle with its adorability.