E at Seven

Today our E turned seven years old. Seven! So big and yet still pretty small. The outfit she is wearing in the photo above really encapsulates who she is at this age. All sparkle and stripes and color and still little enough to want to hold our hands. Seven means that she can walk or scooter pretty much anywhere we need to go, but she still asks to be carried when she is tired. (We mostly comply with this request. I know how quickly a child goes from being small enough to carry to being altogether too big for it.) She likes to sit on my lap after dinner, and she sometimes appears in our bed in the middle of the night. She has about five different names for J, which she uses with affection. She loves her sister fiercely and also gets upset with her using that same fierceness.

She likes to sing the songs from Hamilton, and she knows which words she is not allowed to sing at all, and which ones she can only sing at home, when it's just us. Thanks to our neighborly visits, she has discovered both James Bond and Friends, and she likes both. She can be talked into doing a reading lesson with the offer of an episode of Friends, but otherwise she feels it is a boring waste of time. She is clever and kind. She has an endless number of friends of all ages. She makes people smile regularly, even when she is being cheeky. She has an iron will that she is learning to wield to her advantage. She is an absolute delight, and we are lucky to know her.