Little Brother

It's funny seeing the genesis of things. That's part of the reason I keep the blog. So I can look back and see the first time we did something that later become part of our life.

As you know, I often claim to be an only child who raised by wolves, a claim that annoys my parents, but amuses my siblings. Lily really is an only child. One of my first posts here was on that topic.

She's often hard to wake up in the morning, so Jen and I have to be creative. I was feeling silly the other morning, so I decided to pretend to be a little brother.

And she loved it!

She's wanted to play it every single moment since that morning. Lily loves being the mother hen. She is the only child so she's often kind of bossy. (A little neighbor boy, fed up with being bossed around during a visit, snapped at her with "You're not my mommy, Lily!")

The Little Brother game is interesting for me, because it's a way to get her to explain things in her own words without asking to.  She's been enrolled in the kindergarten's enrichment class and we're trying to get her bumped up a grade. She scored a 100% on a first grade quarterly assessment,  which I find particularly impressive as she hasn't experienced the curriculum for that material,  but the school is still balking about it. They say that she can't articulate how she gets her answers to their satisfaction.

This smacks of a fig leaf to support a decision they've already made. (I wasn't able to attend the meeting, but if I had been there, I would have asked, "And what steps are you taking to fix this?"*)  It's very frustrating. Lily likes explaining things and she's good at it. But if she wants to play little brother and that's fine with me. As they say, "You don't really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

Or, in this case, your make believe little brother.

So, I ask her to explain things and she does so in a way she wouldn't for me. She told me a secret about mommy ("She has a tatoo on her back") and she told me a secret about daddy, ("He has an acid burn on his arm" (I do and it's totally cool. Chicks love scars.))

* Actually, I'm terrible on my feet, so I probably wouldn't have thought to think to ask it until well after I left. L'esprit d'escalier.