Growing by leaps and bounds

To give my neighbors some fun time out, I hung out for a few hours with neighbor girliefriend, aka Mary Poppins and Quorra, who just turned nine. Sometime between last October and now she has completely grown up. Physically that is. We giggled a lot over what her hermit crabs might do once she falls asleep and how Herb (that's the male but she's not sure if he IS male) got out of the terrarium once and made it across the fuzzy purple rug.

I taught her how to knit. You haven't seen such determination since Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephant, and in the end she got it. She tried to teach me to read sheet music and in the end I didn't get it. She practiced 'The Entertainer' and didn't give up until she hit every note perfectly. I noticed that her feet can now reach the pedals.

Oddly, she has not given any thought to what elaborate Halloween costume to hit me up for this year and even declared that she doesn't "have the foggiest idea."

Then she went to bed like a good girl, but a half hour later than parental instruction and not before negotiating expertly for a ice cream snack. Apparently they never grow out of that 'testing the babysitter' thing.