Leaps and Bounds

some days i'm impressed anew by mimi's ever growing skills. she continues to do much of what she has been doing for quite some time now, but there's clearly some growth in the fine tuning. while mimi has always been helpful in the kitchen and looooves to help me bake, i've been really impressed with her skill with two spoons. here she's scooping out cookie dough for baking. some mornings she will use the two spoons to fill a mini-muffin tin with muffin batter and usually does a very good job filling the tin evenly and without dropping too much batter all over the place. i had worried about her making a mess, but i see she has fine tuned her skill enough for me to leave her alone with the batter...be it muffin batter or cookie dough and she will do a great job.

she is also drawing her pictures much faster and with greater ease and also expanding the subject matter to include more than the usual mimi, mommy and house. today she decided to fill a page with all different kinds of insects so she drew butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, ants, bees, snails, etc. i'm always impressed with her natural sense of layout when she draws. she fills the page up with everything she wants in the picture and in the end there's an inexplicable balance to the piece.

she is also starting to write much faster (which means she goes through more envelopes too because she decides she needs to send these letters that she composes to people when she is finished.) while playing outside today, she took a piece of chalk and started to write out a series of random letters. she worked quickly and intently, breezing through a chain of letters and then starting a new line of random letters below that. she did it so purposefully that i felt that she must be trying to write something, but for the life of me i can't figure it out. i'm dying to know, so i asked her urgently, what are you writing. what does it say? and she answers me very matter-of-factly, i have no idea. and continues on thusly, in such a way you might see an artist working in a stream of conscious sort of manner, looking for all the world like she knows what she is doing on some intuitive level.

this evening she surprises me yet again when we lay down in bed to read a bedtime story. usually she points out a few words that she knows how to read, but this evening she read the entire book Green Eggs and Ham (quite lengthy if you remember this story!) to me, and only needed very little prompts when she got stuck. it was mind boggling.

i understand now how the phrase "growing in leaps and bounds" came to be...that is the only way i can describe what is happening to mimi.