A few bits about Nellie

Oh, Nellie. She's getting too smart for her own good, and way too smart for ours. Creative and wild, sensitive and stubborn. And the things she says! Here are just a few Nellie-isms from the last couple of days:

"Hey mom, sometimes when I eat meat I try to get it stuck in my teeth. Then later, I get it out and it's like a little snack. That just happened."

"Deleting the part about about the snapping, I really like snapping turtles."

And caught on the whiteboard at Woldumar: "Penel-ville. President  = Penelope Rose. Sidekick = Annie."

Nellie may not share Annie's quiet, sweet spirit (spirited, as it turns out, is something quite different), but I shouldn't underestimate her thoughtfulness and the encouragement she gives. For example, I've spent the last two months coding lessons for evidence of student engagement. I just finished the last lesson Friday morning. Every time I finish a lesson, I go back and tally the results for each student. By hand. Which is kind of embarrassing, because there are certainly way more sophisticated ways of doing that, including fancy qualitative research software that I was too cheap to invest in. Anyway, it means that there are little slips of paper all over the house with the students' pseudonyms and tally marks. I found one on my nightstand Friday afternoon with a note that read, "Good job Mom! Love - Guess Who?" Seriously, I want to frame it.

She's also planning a baby shower for me. It was completely Nellie's idea, and I wasn't quite sure what to do because although I explained that moms don't usually have showers for their fourth baby, she's really excited about it. She spent an hour after school planning it last week, then wrote the following Facebook message to my mom: "Hi grandma! Can I come over this Saturday to plan a baby shower with you? Here are some of my starts.
 Date: May 31, 2014. For: Jamie Wernet. Blue, green, yellow, and white jelly beans. Blue and white balloons and one should say it's a boy if you can find one. A cake that's blue and white, streamers of any color, party hats, punch, fruit like apples, oranges, pears, peaches, and a vegetable tray. Milk and napkins. I am inviting the Wacyks and some Wernets plus Pam Harrington. I U - Nellie and you can plan some things to We can say the other details in the invitations."

I'm looking forward to it--Nellie has LOTS of fun ideas about what people do at a baby shower.

It gave me a circle-of-life moment, because I remember Erin (11 at the time) planning a shower for my mom when she was pregnant with Emily, and I didn't think it was at all unusual. The only thing I can recall about the shower itself was that my great-grandma Nellie, Nellie's namesake, beat the pants off all of us in this game where you had to pick tiny safety pins out of a bowl of rice while blindfolded. She was about 95 years old.

So, 6-going-on-7 Nellie is a ball of energy and fun. She makes life interesting for everyone who knows her, undoubtedly. And of course, we wouldn't change a thing.