Stella is such a lovely girl at the moment. I find myself looking at her when she's sleeping and wondering how she got to be so big so quickly. It seems like only recently she was a squirming little babe in arms. In her waking hours she constantly amazes me. She generally seems to love school. I'm often worrying, is she learning enough, quickly enough, but I really shouldn't because she seems happy and confident and that's got to be the most important thing. It's so thrilling to see her reading fairly fluently now. She still prefers to be read to, but she can tackle most words and is gaining confidence reading on her own, especially at night time when she should be going to sleep!
She constantly surprises me with her maturity too. The other day she came out of school saying that they had had a yoga teacher who had given each of them a petal and asked them to make a wish. She didn't want to tell me her wish at first, which was fine. I became an aunt the other day and so said that if I had a wish I would ask for my neice to be well and have a good life, thinking that was a pretty good wish! Stella then said, that actually her wish was that all the poor people in the world had food and clean water and suddenly I felt incredibly selfish!!
She's always coming out with great answers in the children's liturgy at church too. When asked what the best lesson they had ever learnt was, other children said things like learning to ride a bike, to walk etc, Stella piped up "learning to love"! A couple of weeks later when asked what they were doing for lent, other kids were giving up chocolate, or chattering, but Stella said she wanted to pray more. I'm not sure where she gets these answers from within, but she knows how to make a mother proud!!
Fantastic snow this week. We were out on Hackney Downs while most of it fell and built a pretty impressive snow man. Later the next day, Fabio and Massimo built an amazingly magical igloo where the girls had their pasta tea.
