One of Clare’s first acts as a five-year-old was to get a sassy new pixie haircut.  It may or may not have been preceded by (another) (false) diagnosis of head lice, but it certainly fulfilled one of her longtime requests.  She’s been asking for short hair “like Grandma” for a year and I finally relented.  A half-hour hair cut turned my little preschooler into a school girl.  The hair stylist gave her a spray-on purple streak to go with her pixie cut.  In the words of Auntie Debbie, “she looks like she’s 7!” 

 

She’s getting quite the response from her hair cut and is walking around with a little strut to her normal dancing and prancing.  I’ll be honest, for a day or two I missed her precious little bob.  But her sassy pixie cut has grown on me and now I think it’s perfectly Five-Year-Old-Clare.

 

 

Clare as a five-year-old has been really delightful.  She’s writing all over any surface she can get her hands on – Mom, Dad, Sam and Clare are her words of choice.  She’s reading simple words that she sees in the world, “Up” in the elevator, “bye” and “dog.”  She’s questioning everything – “what are the flippers on a whale called?” and “how does a muscle move your foot?”  

 

Princesses still rule around our house, but she may be waning just a touch in her enthusiasm for them.  Her love of Frozen is still pretty endless, especially her beloved Elsa, but she’s as likely to play babies and mama, dogs and cats or pretend that she’s a wasp as she’s likely to pretend she’s a princess.  Or, as she told me the other day at bedtime, “Actually, I’m a queen because I’m a princess who became a mom.”  As I tell her every day, “Clare, you can be anything you want to be if you’re willing to work hard for it.”  She replies, “Oh, I will!”