It's been a long, long time since I last interviewed Madeline for a post here. I was going to do it today, but by the time I'd remembered about it, she's already been tucked into bed for the night. So, maybe I'll just substitute some little factlets about her at age 7.25 years that I find both wonderful and bizarre.
I bought a new broom/dustpan set the other day, and though it's designated spot is in the kitchen by the utility shelves, she keeps sneaking them upstairs and sticking them in a corner of her bedroom.
When I have my iPod out, the only song request that she makes is for "Don't You Want Me" - the slightly stalker-ish song that the Human League recorded in 1982 (though I will admit that it's the recording from the tv series Glee on my iPod; apparently, I cannot say no to Blaine Warbler).
The other music she requests is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, so she can turn the volume up while videos on YouTube play and then twirl around in front of the computer with her little sister.
She still wants to play dress-up and other nurturing role-playing things, but I can see her interests maturing. Suddenly, she's into scrapbooking and meditation. Meditation? Where did that come from?
She has a penchant for very modest clothes. Her below-the-knee hemlines and high collars would meet the approval of plenty of conservative-values groups.
Madeline has a crazy amount of patience with her little sister, way more than I had when I was seven and my sister was three. And she still happily plays with the preschool toys with Sadie, whether it's the Little People or Magnatiles. They made wonderful artwork together today, even if Madeline did end up nearly cleaning out my supply of paint.
Since admonishing her that choosing french fries to go with her school lunch does not mean that she picked a vegetable, I've been hearing her say that she had potatoes as a side dish. She knows that I know that she really just had fries again, because she never eats potatoes in their natural form, yet we keep up the illusion ...
She didn't emit one ounce of jealousy a few weeks ago when her little sister was opening birthday gifts, but an inordinate number of those gifts seem to have found permanent homes in Madeline's bedroom. Go figure. She must have been silently plotting, all along.
Over the summer, I realized that the last remant of her toddler-vocabulary had vanished; Madeline's first meal of the day is breakfast and no longer bress-kissed. Sob.
A year ago, she was fussy about sounding out words for reading. Now, she zooms though chapter books like the Ivy & Bean series or the Ramona books at astonishing speeds. And today, when we were playing Monopoly Jr., she was actually playing for her ride tickets with large bills so she'd have to compute her change. This was shocking because a month ago, it appeared that having to do math calculations in her head was a physically painful ordeal.