We Are Family

Currently, Natalie's favorite book is Molly Moves to Sesame Street.  When she is looking at the book on her own I have noticed that she always gravitates to the page that contains the picture below.  We pretend that the people shown are Baba, Mama and Natalie.  I appreciate the fact that the father is orange, the mother is lavender and the little girl Molly is green - showing that physical homogeny is not what defines a family.

Yesterday, Natalie was laying on her stomach on the kitchen floor looking through this book while I was cooking.  When she got to this page she stared at it for a while, kissed it, and then laid her head down on it like she was snuggling up to one of us.


Just now as I was typing this post Natalie saw the below picture on the screen and said "Baba".  She came over and kissed the computer screen several times. It seems that Natalie is really starting to understand what it means to be part of a family and that she loves it just as much as we do.  Every day she has a little more confidence that when we leave her at daycare we will be reunited at the end of the day.  Until a week ago Natalie would break into tears of relief and desperately cling to me every time I picked her up from school.  Now I am greeted by a big smile, a hug and lots of unintelligible, happy chatter about her day.  She loves her friends, her teachers and all the fun things they do during the day, but I think her favorite part of the day is when she says "bye bye" to school and starts mentioning the other family members she wants to see "Baba" and "Doggies".