At 4.5 Lilly is still our sweet, creative, joyous little girl. Some days I see her like she is all grown up, others she is just a baby. This morning when I wished her a happy ‘half birthday’ she was so excited about being able to celebrate by making a crown and picking friends to blow out as ‘candles’ during circle time at school. When I broke the news that this tradition was for actual birthdays she was sooo upset, but when the teacher’s heard they were happy to indulge Lilly and the look on her face when they gave her the crown was as if I had told her we are moving to live in Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World. So precious!

Lilly is clever and smart and sometimes I am stunned by her beauty. She loves to invent new contraptions, do self-led science experiments and mix foods in the kitchen, and make up her own arts and crafts projects. In many ways she relies on me for stimulation but she is slowly gaining independence and thoroughly enjoys the experiments and discoveries she makes. Today she tried powering a box ‘sled’ with a toy jumping frog and decided the best next step would be to tape or glue ice on the bottom to make it move more smoothly. A big part of me wanted to tell her, no, it won’t work, you can’t glue and tape ice to a cardboard box, but I let her give it a try anyways and enjoyed seeing my little scientist at work. 🙂

Lilly is definitely ready for kindergarten and will have an exciting last term of preschool, nature, farm, and music camps, and hopefully lots of swimming before her 5th birthday. We love you, Lilly Bear! xo