Annada Marie Vergo

No more diapers for Annada! She wakes up in the morning, goes to the bathroom, gets dressed and makes her bed. I’m so proud.

In fact, at the YearOne retreat this week Annada asked one of the women to show her a condo bedroom. When they came out Kayla was laughing. “Busted,” she said. Annada ran up to me. “That girl,” she said, pointing at Kayla,”didn’t make her bed. So I showed her how.” Then Annada whispered in my ear, “She was a bad girl.”

(I cringe whenever Annada calls someone a bad/good girl. So as always, I told her Kayla made a bad choice but Kayla is still and always was a valuable and loved girl.)

I told her I would take her anywhere she wanted for a treat. “Old Macdonalds” won.

When we came back, we found Daddy had left her some plums (because she ate the last one at breakfast and told him it was “delicious”) and froggy stickers. So Annada put the frog stickers on the plums and plum stickers on her. First I pretended I thought she was a plum and I was going to eat her. She would laugh until we hit the edge where it started to sound like crying.

Then she started taking her frog plums potty. (A lot of things go “potty” on pretend toilets here.) One rolled off the book serving as a toilet. I cried out, “Oh no, don’t let it pee on the couch” as a joke.

Annada thought that was hilarious. Soon her frogs were bouncing and peeing everywhere and she was running around giving them timeouts. I shrieked each time it happened. Annada would laugh until she couldn’t breathe. Then she would rest for 30 seconds and jump up to do it again.

I love to see her laugh like that. And I hope no one ever gives her a plum in public.

When I picked Annada up from school today she gave me the greatest hug. I signed her out thinking she was right next to me. Her teacher was holding the clipboard and thought the same thing. But when I looked, she was gone. At first we just causally called her name. But after a couple minutes we were running outside trying to find her. She vanished in less then a minute in a pretty wide open space with few hiding places.

Finally we found her sitting on the bench around the school, just quietly waiting for me to come talk with her. Mrs. Templeton and I ran up on her at the same moment. Whew, that is an awful feeling.

After we had all recovered, Annada and I sat on the bench and ate the snack I brought her. She told me she decided to go to the shady bench. I asked her what she enjoyed about that day.

“Playing with my friend on the playground, making a peacock and seeing Mommy and Daddy,” she said. Then she told me all about making a peacock out of feathers. It sounded like she had a great day.

I asked her if it was a “thumbs up” day (meaning a good day). “No,” she replied.

“What was wrong?” I asked. “The teacher was what was bad,” she replied.

Uh oh, I thought. This is a new classroom and a new teacher. It is possible something is wrong.

“What about the teacher was bad,” I asked.

“The teacher put Joshiel in the thinking chair because he was mean to other kids,” Annada said. “That made me sad.”

What a sweet spirited girl – it really bothers her when anyone hurts. Poor Joshiel has been having a really hard time. He cries throughout the day because he misses his mom. And I’m relieved, it sounds like her teacher is doing great.

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