E has started prohibiting me from putting pictures of her on Facebook, but she doesn't remember this seldom-used blog! I don't have a picture right now but I thought I would clear the cobwebs from the mailbox, so to speak. E has finished one week of first grade and it is apparently fun though you wouldn't know it with the way she clings and protests at drop off time. A friend told me recently that she was like that as a child, and still can't really articulate why. I guess I need to back off E and not push her for an explanation. She's said enough that I know she realizes it doesn't make sense to be afraid of going to school, because she knows she'll have fun most of the day. At the end of the day she is never in a hurry to leave. The other day we found a lost hall pass in the restroom at school, when I picked her up, and she was "too shy" to hang it on the doorknob of the room it belonged to, even though the room and hallway were deserted. She's been "too shy" to wear a beautiful top that she loves - it's too beautiful and it might make people give her compliments on it. She loves her new shoes but thinks "they look too funky on me" so she hasn't worn them in public yet. There have been other examples of crippling shyness. I realized that I could do a better job of accepting it without comment, as I'm the one who wet my pants in first grade because I was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom one day. It's a memory I haven't thought about too much, and it's fuzzy enough that I sort of doubted myself. Maybe it was someone else in the class and I just empathized, I thought. But then I remember Mrs. Dent asking why on earth I didn't raise my hand. She was a scary teacher to me in general, but her voice was not angry, just kind of gently incredulous. And I didn't get in trouble but I was embarrassed. The bathroom was in the classroom, too. A couple yards away probably. I remember the classroom pretty well, and where I sat and where some of my friends sat. I can't picture what that little cinder block bathroom cell looked like inside. Maybe I never used it. Somewhere I went around that age, if it wasn't first grade, there was a bathroom with a row of small toilets and one adult-sized one at the end. No doors or dividers at all! Ah well, memory lane. In any case, this is a fun age for E. She loves card games and Monopoly Jr., and can now lose a game without too much pain. She learns games quickly and figures out her strategy to win. She will invent new rules to make it more fun, or new games like the hybrid of Crazy 8 and Slapjack that we played today. If a jack turns up in your Crazy 8 discard pile, you slap it and then the other person has to take all those cards.