Am I Going To Survive This Kid?

I know, I know, this photo looks misplaced in time somehow, doesn't it. But it isn't. It just encapsulates my little FDPG, who is becoming a complete terror, at the tender age of six. I worry daily that she might just eat us all alive.

Here she is in her Halloween garb. She was, as you can probably tell, a pirate. But not just any pirate; oh no, no, no, FDPG had very specific ideas as to what sort of pirate she was going to be. Most of these ideas involved being terrifying, fierce, and serious. And she did this mugging routine in every single picture I took of her that night.

But this, this photo, is the essence of FDPG. She's a take no prisoners kind of gal. Every morning she bursts into my bedroom, never mind if I am sleeping, and asks "What are we going to study today, Mum?" She's been known to shriek with delight at the idea of doing Spelling Workout. She knows all the Egyptian gods and goddesses off by heart. Once I paused outside her bedroom door, listening silently while she listed them all out loud. I asked her the next day why she did that and she said "So I don't forget them." She reminds her (humanities professor) father that the Phoenicians were from Canaan, NOT Egypt. She learned origami by working through an origami book every single night until she had done every single fold in the book (a 185 page book). She taught herself to read while we were renovating the house we'd just bought when we moved here - in 5 weeks she went from reading simple readers to whipping through Magic Treehouse books. And I do mean whipping. Now a little light reading for her is an entire MTH book before bed. I don't want to give the impression that she is obnoxious, because she isn't; she's actually quite charming. She's just far, far more intellectual and motivated than any us. She doesn't quite roll her eyes at us but we all know she's thinking about it, even if she's too polite to do it to our faces. Thankfully her two brothers are very restful sorts. They like Lego and sugary food and squishing crumbs into the carpet, normal kid things. When I need to escape the million watt beam of FDPG's concentrated attention, I creep into Dominic's room and lay on the carpet while he and Max squabble mildly over who's farting or who left toothpaste all over the sink. I can hear FDPG upstairs, though, rustling through her books and plotting new study strategies.

Am I going to survive this kid?