Our community here continues to grow, from a core of friends from our various schools, to now include friends of ours, and of course of Maya's, from her lovely school. It is always, and was again, fun to bring this crew together, to talk in half-minute snippets between parenting tasks, to see each others' kids a bit older and more confident, to celebrate Maya's birthday, and with it to celebrate childhood, growth, and aging.
Maya's actual birthday fell on a school day, and both of us parents were able to join her to participate in her school's ceremony, which was a great experience -- part learning (months and numbers), part storytelling / listening, part celebration. A thumb-sized baby Maya, on a fist-sized earth, went around and around the candles of the sun, and at each year we stopped to talk about what Maya was like at 0, then 1, 2, 3, and now 4. It was a chance for Maya --and her class-- to hear a bit about herself at these various ages, to feel how different it is to be 4 than to be any previous age, and at the end of it all four hip-hip-hoorays marked her official turning four.
Now that summer is here, and while Anna still doesn't walk, let alone insist on walking, we're out and about as much as we can. It's mild and windy in Berkeley, cold over in San Francisco, and hot down the Bay and up in the hills, so we have our pick of activities and climates. More to come..
