My daughter, who is now 4 years and 2 months old, has been making some noticeable strides in her development, both mental and physical. It’s a joy to watch and be astounded when she, for example, takes the DeWalt electric driver from my hand and removes the battery cover from an old broken-down Little Tykes play table, then removes the batteries and tries to replace them, and then screws the cover back on to test the unit out. No luck, as expected. So she removes the cover again and digs out the new 4 AA batteries we tried and put the cover back on.
That might not seem like much, but she overcame her fear of the “loud” noise the electric drill/driver makes enough to actually hold and use it, correctly, and I stood by her quite impressed.
Then today she decided to organize her “office” which is a workspace I carved out for her in the den. It’s just a play desk and until today, has been where piles of half-cut-up construction paper and lots of writing, drawing, and coloring utensils have been randomly dumped. No more!
She suddenly decided that she needed a proper workspace and went and got a wastebasket, cleaned and organized everything laying around her desk.
She also decided to straighten up her kitchen, which was no easy chore. It’s a small space with a lot of stuff scattered about. But she did it:
She runs the kitchen with a store on the right with the ice cream counter and has a cash register. It’s something to watch her in action. She has the whole operation down pat. Those are lemon play-dough cookies she made in the blue Tupperware container in the bottom right of the photo, for sale. She has menu boards up, a pantry, little lights and decorations up around it and sweeps it to keep it clean. 4 years old. I’m impressed. When I was 4 I was still trying to eat rocks and frogs. Next, she’ll be trying to Six-sigma the thing.