Katie's Making FRIENDS!

I picked Katie up from school on Thursday and found her outside playing with a little boy named Ben.

On Tuesday afternoon pickup, when we were washing up in the sink before heading home, a little girl named Nora followed us over and stood nearby while Katie washed her hands.

I tried to play it cool... I didn't squeel or oooh or ahhh over these kids or anything lame like that, but I will admit that inside I was doing a little dance. 

My Katie has friends!

Not that she hasn't friends before (she's got an adorably sweet cousin and a boy friend we set up play dates with every so often)... but it seemed like she talked about her invisible friends more than her *real* friends.  So this was so exciting for her mommy to see.

She's still doing well in school and every morning at drop off we have our goodbye routine.  (There's no "mixin' it up" when it comes to the goodbye routine.  Just ask Katie.)  The goodbye routine goes like this: I walk down the stairs to the cafeteria and wait on the landing (if I'm off by a step, she tells me so that I can fix it).  Katie gets to the bottom step and I give her a huge hug.  By then, her teacher is there to greet her and off she goes, without a backward glance.

I'm really happy that she starts her school day so happily.  It would be terrible if she started to get upset because I was leaving her for the day... and she would miss me so horribly while I was gone... and nothing at her school, no friends, no fun, would help her to ease the pain of not having me near her.  Yep.  That would be terrible.  So it's good that she doesn't miss me at all and doesn't even say "good bye" when she walks away with her teacher. 

Yep, it's good that she couldn't care less that her mommy cries a silent tear every morning loves school so much that I don't have to worry about leaving her.

She's probably too busy thinking of her fun-filled, action-packed day ahead. 

There have been a lot of fun-filled, action-packed days over the past month and a half.  She's gone to a cave (and panned for gems), the theater, the Falls, Underwater Adventures, a wave pool, and played in a "wet n wild" park event with fire hoses and pools.  She's learning about gardening and taking a dance class (and next month she starts her class learning about dogs).  She's made new friends (!!!).  Whew.  I'm exhausted just thinking about it!

And we were going to get her from school early tomorrow so we could make a family trip to the Farmer's Market (Thursday) but decided that since we didn't have the strollers (grandma and grandpa brought them to the lake in anticipation of our fun weekend... which we didn't have) and we're all getting over some icky sickness, we would go next week. 

Maybe that will give me time to look for a kid leash for Jacob.