Giggle Bean

Kit was putting Claire to sleep when I suddenly head loud laughing coming from upstairs. After a pause, there was more laughing. It kept going on and off. I was wondering what was going on when Kit showed up and explained.

Kit had said something to Claire like, "Goodnight, my little snuggle bean." In response, Claire threw up her hands and said in a vaguely New Jersey-ish sort of way, "Do I look like a bean to you?" This cracked Kit up, which in turn cracked Claire up. Claire enjoyed this turn of events and repeated, "Do I look like a bean?" It went on like this for a while before Kit left Claire to entertain herself and hopefully fall asleep.

It ended up taking Claire a couple of hours to get to sleep. We could hear her in there repeatedly saying, "Do I look like a bean?" and making herself laugh. Claire, of course, has always tried to find ways to keep herself awake at night, and this was a fun new way to do it. Over the next few days, we heard the same refrain over and over from Claire. "Do I look like a bean?" As you can tell, the humor wears off after a while, but it was pretty funny the first couple of times.

"Intelligence"

Kit was reading Claire her books for bedtime tonight, when I heard Kit say, "Claire! Wow! I am so proud of you!" Usually Claire doe not get that reaction for simply listening to a story, so I was wondering what was gong on. Fortunately, Kit called me in and said that she was really proud of Claire. Claire explained, "I spelled a really big word!" Prompted for the word in question, Claire said she had spelled intelligence.

What Claire had actually done was read the letters from a book, so in a sense she read the word rather than spelled it from memory, but still it was extremely surprising. We don't normally work on spelling with Claire. She might have occasionally spelled very short words like cat. But apparently she has been paying attention in school, and now she seems to really know her letters, at least I, N, T, E, L, G, and C.