Persistence

Bella had a class project: Persistence. Every kid in her kindergarten class was encouraged to pick something to do or learn, and stick with it. Then they were to give a short presentation on what they persisted in. Bella and I decided that her persistence project would be to build a big Lego set all by herself.

We picked out a big yellow crane kit with over 500 pieces, and over the course of 4 weeks, we spent over 8 hours building this thing. And by "we" I mean SHE did everything, but I did quality control: As she finished a step, I took a look and if there were things out of place, I asked her to look harder at the instructions... and if there were pieces that didn't snap easily, I might have helped once or twice. But that entire thing was built by her, with her following the directions.

She definitely had challenges - some days were hard to motivate, some steps were harder to understand, and some parts were sort of boring to assemble... but by Sunday afternoon, she put the last piece in place and held it up, with a big grin on her face. We had taken pictures throughout the process, and printed them all up. She glued them to a posterboard and wrote her story.

Today, Pamela brought the poster and the crane into class, and Bella was the star of the show. She radiated pride as everyone oohed and ahhed over her crane and poster - the teacher said she had never seen a kid do a project that complex, and that the bar is raised.

An interesting aside - one of the alternative persistence projects we thought about was learning to spell our full last name. Bella thought that wouldn't be much fun for persistence. All the same, on Friday she recited all 16 letters to me from memory. So she really did both projects. What a girl!!!

Isaac has been quite something these days too: He's really being a little boy, but he is maybe the most polite gentleman I've ever met. He always says please and thank you, and you're welcome. The other night, he was arranging his toy robots on the shelf, and wanted to switch two of their places. As he reached for one of the robots, he said "excuse me, mister".

We went to a sock hop this weekend for Isaac's preschool, and he spent several hours running around playing, and just a little dancing. But we had a few moments where he would be dancing at one end of the gym, then suddenly dart clear across the room to the climbing area. As as he scooted, his arms were out to his sides and his feet were a blur - I suspect that his toes were touching only every 4th step or so, and only then so as not to arouse suspicion.

On my own front, my tendrils are slowly unfurling, extending out into my network, and my next thing is cordially invited to present itself. We'll leave it at that for now.