Happy Half Birthday!

Today was Anna's half-birthday celebration at her school, and it was so sweet I teared up at one point. The school lets each child celebrate their birthday (those, like Anna, with summer birthdays observe their half-birthdays).

And it's not your typical birthday party with a sugary cake or cupcakes and the birthday song. The whole family is invited for the celebration, which takes place almost first thing in the morning.

During attendance call, we got to see the children answer "here," "hi," "hola" and other things I didn't catch or didn't know. Then the children counted off as they sat in their circle to see how many were in attendance. When it was her turn, Anna correctly said her number of the day, "9". Then the students talked with the teacher about the calendar and what day it was yesterday and is today and what day of the month it was yesterday and is today and what year it is and also, of course, the month.

Then they said the pledge of allegiance, and Anna got to hold the flag.

For her birthday celebration, they placed a large yellow circle on the floor to represent the sun. Anna held a globe of the planet Earth and walked around the sun 3.5 times, to represent her years as it takes the Earth one year to spin around the sun. Each time she walked around the sun I said two milestones she accomplished that year. Of course, I took my best guess on the first two years and said that she crawled and walked the first year and that she started talking and feeding herself the second year (she could sit at the table and feed herself quite well when we got her at 26 months).

We also read one of her favorite books to the class and showed the class three photos (baby pic, family pic and a favorite individual pic) of her and said some things about
her such as her favorite color, favorite food and things she likes to do, family members, etc.

At the end we also left individual bags of fruit gummies for each child. They were distributed and put in backpacks at the end of the class day. And, we also made a little donation to the school's Fine Arts Fund, which is a great thing that has helped pay for some cool extras such as bringing in a Spanish teacher once a week and other other cultural learning opportunities. Yes, believe it or not, Anna is now bilingual — and Russian is not the other language! She can count almost to 10 in Spanish. I'd really like for her be able to learn Russian, too. But that ain't gonna happen around here unless I hire my Russian MOPS friend or figure out some way to teach the children some basics myself.