This Weekend...

- Tara buttoned and unbuttoned my shirt perfectly, albeit a tad slowly. I had no idea she could do buttons - she duly informed me that she's done it at school. Wow.
- She learnt about where food comes from (other than from 'the market') by playing Farmville, a Facebook application/game thingy, with her dad. She decided where the cherry trees went, wanted the farmer to be a girl, and learnt that we have to wait for things to grow. 'Two hours?', she asked increduously when told that's how long it would take for the strawberries to grow. A few hours later she asked to log on so she could check if the strawberries had come. (We tried to use this opportunity to make a point and talk about how difficult it is to grow food, and therefore we shouldnt waste it, but it didnt really work as well as we had hoped.)
She sang 'The farmer plants the seed...' to complete this exercise of virtual farming, which led Papa to comment observantly that there was no situation for which she did not have a song.
While buying animals for the farm, she asked 'What do we get from a pig?'. (Her father replied, 'meat' but moved on to other issues quickly before the gory details were asked for.)Before this, when informed that 'Cows give us milk' she rolled her eyes exasperatedly and said impatiently 'I KNOW cows give milk.'
- She KNOWS a lot of things. I think its this new school she's at (it follows the Montessori system of primary education) where they play - oh, sorry, 'work' :) - with binomial cubes (!!), know what funnels are, and call a square a square, and a cube, well, a cube.
- She broke down most of the words into its phonetic components and pointed out which letter it started with as well as a host of other words which started with a similar sound. Last weekend she shocked me by reading lists of three-letter words. Really. She can read.
-All this indicates that she is seriously stepping over some invisible line, slipping out of dependency, coming into her own, you know... Growing Up.