Living In Different Worlds

While adult Americans are enmeshed in topics like Russian influence in elections, health care reform, and immigration, I'm watching our visiting four year old going about her life blissfully unaware of any of that.

She's enjoying helping her grandfather water the garden, sifting the compost, making bread, putting away the dishes.  She's enjoying when her grandfather is being silly, but also learning to distinguish between when he's telling a joke and saying something serious.  And when he's working on something else, she has ways to poke him, pull his shirt, call his name repeatedly, wiggle her way onto his lap to get him to reengage with her.

She's been enjoying the magpie family that stops in our yard now and then and this morning while we were eating breakfast on the deck a Steller Jay got very close looking for loose peanuts.  On this trip she's seen a real wild moose for the first time, musk oxen at the musk ox farm, and various other Alaska animals at the zoo.

She's adding words to her vocabulary daily.  She's got projects she's working on - like getting across the monkey bars by herself, and riding a bike.  She wanted me to take the training wheels off the bike and worked on the bolt with the monkey wrench.  But keeping balance, pedaling fast enough, and steering without the training wheels proved much harder than she expected.

She can recognize all the letters and some words and she's learning how to write them.  When I'm doing the Sudoku in the newspaper, she wants me to do the crossword puzzle with her.  I have to figure out the word and tell her how to spell it and she tries to write the letters in the little boxes.  The letter S tends to backwards.  When I say things like, "That's great, but it is upside-down," she quickly replies, "Not if you are sitting over there."  This morning she said she couldn't make a B, so I showed her to make the line first, then one loop, then the other.  She copied what I did and made B after B after B, reveling in her new B writing skill.  In the picture it's easy to spot what I wrote and what she wrote.

She's got this whole world that she's absorbed in that overlaps with mine in many places, but the larger world of politics is definitely not part of her realm.  Lucky her.  And lucky me to have her visiting and getting to enter her world.