"I thought I would feel different"

Here's a post I wrote on the girls' fourth birthday. I stuck it in Drafts and never posted it.

    **********

Four years ago, two people were taken out of my body. I gestated them long enough for them to breathe on their own, and since then they have grown a little bit each day. Today, both girls walk, talk, and eat on their own, and have their own internal lives.

Yesterday Ivy said that no-one else would be allowed to eat her cat cake. Today she was fine with her cake being devoured by others.

During the party, I noticed that Hazel was missing. She had snuck away to do some drawing. She knows how to handle overwhelming social events!
When I found her, I told her that she was four now. She looked stunned. Gazed at the wall. Turned to me with wide eyes and open mouth. "But I thought I'd feel different!"

And then she bent back to her drawing, narrating it quietly. "and the villain jumps up in the tree and here is a tiger to lick his head and they go flying up in space and..."

Reading

A loooong time ago, when she was little (as she likes to say), Hazel pointed to the word BED on a shop window and said "BED!". I think she was two.

Now Hazel is four, and shows no sign of reading. Yes, she writes her name and likes counting and learns books off by heart, but actually reading? Nup, I have mummies who do that for me.

At the last twins playgroup for the year, I was holding Hazel (who is four, and thus big, but still needs a cuddle) while chatting with Jane. Jane was standing on a stepladder, holding a plastic bike over her head, and trying to place it on top of a teetery stack of other plastic vehicles, stacked high inside a hard-to-reach cupboard. That's the way it rocks at playgroup - the kids get to play, but the mums have to do four-dimensional Tetris when it's all over.

So I was holding Hazel and leaning against a cupboard, when Hazel leaned over and placed her finger on the first letter of a hand-written word on a piece of masking tape.

P

She said the name of the letter.

P

She said it again.

Puh

Then she said the sound that it makes.

Rrr

O

Dj

Rr

Aa

Mm

I said that in this word, the G is a hard Guh, not Dj. Try again.

She sounded it out very slowly, twice more. Then she did the sounds quickly. Then, she said "Program! This cupboard is for Program! Why is it for Program?"

We found the word Holiday and talked about holiday programs and how school kids sometimes do stuff in their holidays and our day continued.

I can feeeel the books just over Hazel's horizon. She loves hearing the old favourites read to her, but think of all the new favourites that she will read to herself one day! The private worlds, just for her.