Alpha Friends

When I picked Amelia up from Nana's last Thursday the first thing she told me was that her clothespin was moved down but she didn't want to tell me why. (This is a behavior-related thing.) My mind immediately jumped to conclusions like: she pushed down another child! she threw things across the classroom! But she wouldn't tell me. As the afternoon progressed I tried to pry from her why it was moved. I tried tricking, I tried cajoling, I tried bribing. After dinner she was playing with one of her toys and said something behavior related and I asked, "Is that why your clothespin was moved?" She said no. And when I asked her why she told me ... she had gotten up and looked at the time-out room while she was in music class and when she didn't sit down after being asked twice, her clothespin was moved when they got back to her classroom. I was so relieved! I just told her that she should try harder next time to do what grown-ups tell her, but really I was relieved. The music teacher is young and new and I don't think he appreciates the developmental levels of the different aged children. A 3rd grader is not going to behave the same as a kindergartener, and vice versa. She told me this afternoon she was much better and her clothespin wasn't moved down. She was very proud of herself and I told her I was, too!

This afternoon Amelia got her fake apple from her play kitchen and declared it was her alpha friend Addy Apple. She put it on the chair she sometimes uses as her pretend bed and then proceeded to get alpha friends B-I. For "f" I put a frog down and she said, no, she needed a fish. So not only was she repeating something they've been doing at school this week, she was precisely copying it. I loved watching her expression as she would pause to remember what came next. For some reason instead of going to "J" she chose to put her Dora doll in the purple pajamas as the last friend.

She often doesn't tell us what she has done at school but she will later mimic it or have it come out some other way - reading a story to a stuffed animal or playing with her toys. It's so cute.