the moral of the story? don't mess with susanna mann

wednesdays might just be my favorite afternoon of the week.  for one, we're not racing out the door to get to an activity like tennis or baseball or soccer.  (we do have choir, but that's not until 6 pm.  which makes dinner a little tricky, but that's another issue entirely.)  and it's a day that i don't volunteer at the kids' school, so it always has been at least seven hours since i've last seen them.

but the biggest reason i love wednesdays is that susanna comes home with her backpack stuffed with all the goodies she's worked on from the previous week.  we'll sit side-by-side on the family room couch and go through each and every item.  she even helps me sort them into two piles: the wow-isn't-that-great-now-let's-chuck-it pile, and the this-really-is-awesome-so-let's-keep-it pile.  (the former almost always doubles the latter in volume.)

in that latter pile are her "stories".  several times a week, her teacher gives the students a writing prompt of some sort, and susanna gets to wax poetic on the subject at hand.  there's space at the top of the paper for a drawing, and the kids are expected to do the best they can at stretching out the words to spell them themselves.  i've loved to see the progression of her "stories" from the beginning of the year until now.  i honestly have difficulty wrapping my mind around how much she has learned and grown in this relatively short amount of time. in august, she could barely write her full name.  and now she's stapling pages together because she has so  much she wants to share.

she takes great pride in reading these to me and liam (and then again to chris when he gets home), and we ooh and  aah at the appropriate times to let her know how impressive her literary talents are.  i'm thinking of making a book of some sort in june when we close the door on her kindergarten year.  the stories are often excellent documentation of what has been going on in our lives, from holidays to sleepovers to random events that she deems worth describing.

but today's was a first.  asked to write a story about the cat and the hat in honor of dr.seuss's birthday, she sort of went off on a tangent.  a surprisingly violent tangent.  is it bad to say that i laughed outloud?

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