I’ve noticed that my daughter keeps getting older, well chronologically any way, but her friends don’t. She seems to have to change friends every year or two so that she can keep her friends in that six to eight year old age group. Luckily for her, here at home, we just keep getting more children (some people just don’t know how to say, no more) and so she keeps moving down the line in which one she plays with. When one child gets too old to play with her, at her level, she moves to the next younger one.

Currently her best friend seems to be our seven year old son. He’s teaching her how to play his video games, she’s thrilled with the attention, and he’s quite happy because he always wins. He’s also trained her in his army game, in which he is the general, and she is one of his soldiers. They dress up in their green army uniforms; take their machine guns (which today were actually hockey sticks), sneak through the house seeking out their targets to destroy. Again, she gets his one on one attention and he gets to boss her around, so they are both quite happy in their new found relationship.

I find it rather curious though that with her current developmental level of interest that she has taken on one age appropriate trait. She has transitioned to that terrible teenage girl phase of occupying the bathroom for hours, to get every hair on her head just as she thinks it should be. Though how she can look in the mirror after an hour of doing her hair and say to her self, “My hair finally looks perfect,” is beyond me. Some days I look at her hairdo and think that I wouldn’t want to be seen in public with her, if you know what I mean. She also dresses everyday like she has a date or a speaking engagement or something and that also takes her at least an hour. Most days she doesn’t even go anywhere because she’s homeschooled so I’m not sure why she would spend so much time worrying about her clothing. I’m not really complaining about her looking nice, I just find it curious.

I do need to finally accept that very few things she does have any logical basis. I could drive myself, and a few others, completely crazy trying to understand her motivation or reasoning. One decision she made a few years ago still boggles my mind and still makes me laugh when I remember it. Our family went to the local high school one evening for open swimming. We were having a great time straddling noodles and floating on them and playing chicken. That’s how I noticed that she wasn’t properly clothed and sent her immediately to the locker room to change and she got to watch the rest of us swim for the next hour. I had purchased her a new swimming suit; it was a bikini sort with one of those cute little skirts. Well, apparently she couldn’t find the bottoms, only the skirt. You’d think that maybe she would just wear her underwear under the skirt but she didn’t.

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