Milestones

My sweet little Claire will be 7 tomorrow, and a recently achieved milestone has got me reminiscing. Once we got through the first two months of colic, she was a model child. She slept through the night early on, and she would wait quietly for me to get her out of her crib in the morning, never uttering a peep. As a toddler and preschooler she would entertain herself for hours while I did school with Elise and my household chores. She started talking early, and talking well! She pretty much potty-trained herself, following her big sister's lead. Come to think of it, she practically taught herself to read, as well, and has been voraciously devouring books since Kindergarten. She excels in all her subjects and is the type of student who loves to tackle her work first thing, so she has the rest of the day for all sorts of imaginative adventures.

In Claire's mind, though, there were a couple of accomplishments she really wanted to achieve before she turned 7. The first one was riding a bike, and I taught her how to do that this summer, taking advantage of the new subdivision going in behind our house. Thankfully she caught on pretty quickly, because I was woefully out of shape and out of breath in the process! After a few wobbly tries, she got the hang of it! But the other milestone she hoped to reach was out of our control. Without painful intervention, or another collision with the trundle bed frame (yep, she was the first of my kids to get stitches!) we really just had to let things run their course. So you can imagine how excited she was last night when this happened: