Momzilla... or just proud?

I want to brag on my kid for a minute. So if you're not into that, skip this entry. But it would be nice if you could just hear me out...

I like to talk about my girls a lot, especially on this blog. But I've never thought of myself as one of those super-competitive moms who wants to compare everything and declare her child the winner. I just finished a book called Momzillas about those kind of moms who live on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Actually, it was a lot like The Real Housewives of New York (which I am embarassed to say I have watched -and enjoyed- a few times. It gets boring when hubby is working late!) only with preschoolers. Language skills, artistic ability, potty-training, head circumference, Apgar scores... you name it and it became a competition. You don't have to live near Central Park to run into this either- everyone knows at least one mom who tries to find something her kid is better at than yours.

I feel like I've tried very hard not to be that mom. I studied child development enough to know that kids grow at their own pace. There were things Big Sister did early, and there were other things that I saw other kids her age doing and thought "Who knew?!" or "I'd better get on that!" She's always been quite verbal and very smart, but I never needed to prove it to other moms. The astonishment and compliments from random people at Target, moms at the park, even our own pediatrician, were affirmation enough.

SO- don't take this as a "my kid is smarter than your kid" post. It's simply an "I'm amazed that I had anything to do with developing this kid, isn't she great?" post: Big Sister, my three-and-a-half-year-old, can read! Not like a ""memorizing her favorite books" kind of reading. She is sounding out letters and figuring out words. Simple ones, for now, but it is amazing. She can spend an hour on Starfall playing the phonics games and figuring out the stories. She's also, as you can see from the picture above, working on writing. Her imagination is terrific (yesterday she found a tiny Barbie crown in the parking lot at church and decided it must have belonged to a tiny mouse princess who lost it...) so when the reading/writing skills come along, I am expecting a wonderful little storyteller. Maybe she'll have her own blog before we know it!



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Oh, that is from Little Sister. She's a genius too...