10 brothers

As some of you might know, Selah claims to have 10 brothers, invisible to everyone but her. And although we can't see them like she can, they are mostly characters we've all seen before, like Dobby (from Harry Potter), Yoda, Luke, 2 Ewok & Han Solo (from Star Wars). Sometimes Selah will interchange different characters from different stories she encounters - but the main staples of her clan seem to be Dobby & Yoda. She requests their counsel quite frequently and refers to their needs and desires.

Selah picks up a pocket calculator and places it to her ear. "This is my cell phone right now." She places the phone in her upturned palm, peering at it, punching numbers. She announces what Dobby's phone number is, and then asks for some silence to have her conversation with her forefinger in the air.

"Hello, Dobby? Uh-huh... Yeah.... Oh, sure - talk to Papa."

Paul takes the phone from her. "Hey Dobby, make it a great Wednesday. Get over that hump!"

She takes the phone back, places it over her ear, she saunters away with a smile, "Good one, Papa."

Selah is going to save the world.

Selah's very favorite animated show right now is called Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Twelve year old Aang is the main character of the series, and he's been discovered by two siblings, his age, as the last Avatar. An Avatar is a person who employs earth, fire, air, and water magic to save the world from the destructive lordship of the Fire Nation. Aang can often be found meditating quietly, before battling the forces against him, among other disciplines he employs.

Recently, I went looking for Selah because the house became very quiet. I peaked into her bedroom and saw her sitting cross-legged, with her hands clasped together over her heart. She turned and looked up at me, from her spot on the carpet in a stream of sunlight, "Shhhhhhhhhhhhh.....," she whispered, "I'm medi-cating."

Teefs

Selah lost her first tooth last year, when she was six. She pushed it around with her tongue until it was barely hanging on by a single thread. Paul and I tried to coach her into a sure-fire method of removal, but she wasn't having any of it. She made multiple excuses constantly:

"It'll come out next year, sometime."

"Maybe if I pour some water on it, then it will melt out."

"I want this tooth forever, I don't want it out."

"After Burning Man festival, it'll come out."

All of her reasons for holding so tightly onto this tiny bottom, barely-there tooth seemed perfectly logical to her... So we let it go, and eventually, it came out. Now, more than a year later, she's lost a grand total of EIGHT teeth - including the top front two teeth. It's taken her face a few months to catch up to the size of these chompers!

Yesterday Selah told a friend at school that there was indeed a tooth fairy, and it was her mom. She was coming off the big yellow school bus, and commanding a group of about 10 children's attention with her story:

"My mom is the tooth fairy for all the children in the world. She goes to their rooms in the middle of the night, she tip toes in there, and she STEALS the teeth! Then, she leaves them all ten dollars, and they wake up and spend the money! Isn't that cool? Isn't my mom, cool?!"

Suddenly, ten children turned toward me, and they all wanted 10 dollars.

A La Francais

Here's Selah skipping at the zoo with her French teacher, Madame, and a classmate.

Recently, Selah's great and wonderful school, Waters of Life, was hit with a permit issue, and was consequently closed down. Thankfully, this occurred right as the children were about to have their spring hiatus, and gave the heads of the school some time to find an alternative space.

A new school site was secured, but won't be ready until next week. The new site is an arts performance center in a small beach community called Seaview. This performance center is run by a wonderful soul named Graham, who also coaches a team of acrobats and performers in a troupe called The Hiccup Circus. Now Selah will add stilt-walking, unicycle and gymnastics to her usual, amazing routine.

Until then, the students have been going on excursions like the zoo, the school's farm, and the beach. At each location, the specialty teachers join the students in between play activities. For instance, today, Selah had all of her classes at the zoo. She chased and marveled at the peacocks, wandering free on the pathways around the exhibits, and then she sat in the shade with her classmates and had French.

Madame is such a wonderful, expressive, passionate educator - she speaks to the children entirely in her native tongue. I cannot explain how amazing it is for me, as a mother, to watch my child understand and comprehend such a complex language. The only thing I understood was Bon Jour! But then, after that, it was a blur of Madame's wild hand movements, throated, whispery French words and giggling children, who all seemed to understand every word she said.

It warms us so deeply to experience a taste of this learning style. How lucky Selah and the other children are who have the opportunity to expand like the sponges they are in such a dynamic, exciting environment. What would our lives have been like if we were learning French in a zoo, on an island in the Pacific, with monkeys, parrots and cranes chirping in the background~!?

It's an amazing blessing and an honor to see Selah open and grow with such confident curiosity, to be exactly who she is, and celebrated for it.