Introducing: Emma

"I made a new friend today, Mama!" he exclaimed as I picked him up this afternoon from his day of elective classes including Young Authors Class and Crafting Class.  We try to really make a point that the world is full of friends to meet and make, and it's like a treasure hunt finding them out and cherishing them.

"She's right there," he said as he buckled up in the back seat.  She?  I looked to the sidewalk where the children were waiting for the slow stream of parents in their various vehicles to creep up and collect them one by one under the teachers' ever-watchful eyes.  "Emma's the one in the purple shirt."

I saw just the back of her head with a blondish pony-tail pulled into a rubberband and wispy tendrils falling over her ears and neck.  She wore a faded lavender tee shirt and equally faded jean shorts with denim ruffles at the hems.  She was talking with expressive gesticulations to the teacher in her line, and I only got a glance and the overall impression that she was a spirited little girl.

"I'm proud of you for making friends with a girl.  That's a big boy thing to make friends with all different kinds of people," I said over my shoulder as we  drove on.  We've had some little issues with him in the past not including girls in play or treating them respectfully.  He's expressed that pink is stupid, glitter is stupid, princesses are extra stupid (except for Princess Leia, of course), and above all, girls are not as cool as boys and can't be friends with boys.  As you can imagine, this was very distressing.  I was deeply worried (in my extreme, over-the-top way as I do) that we were raising a bigoted male supremacist little boy who would grow into a bigoted male supremacist man who would never get married, and would become a lonely hermit in a house full of cats and comic books kept in protective vinyl covers.   Aaron, on the other hand, said it was a boy thing and he'd out grow it.  So to learn today that Andres had made a friend with a girl was (in my mind) sort of like North Korea giving South Korea a hug.   If I had bottle rockets laying around, I would have set them off in celebration.

"Yeah, she drew me a picture."  He pulled a crumpled up piece of paper from his backpack and passed it to me. At a stop light I looked at it.

"That's me," he said pointing to the boy figure.  "I drew the Lorax, and she drew me."

But what struck me was not only did she draw Andres as a stick figure with his hair in his eyes and a nice little smile, but under that she drew a large heart with an arrow going through it, and had written inside the heart was a single word: LOVE.  He didn't even notice it until we got home and he was gushing over her picture and he started reading it out, and looking at me with a puzzled expression, a bashful grin spread across his lips.

"She's a good writer," he said putting the letter back in his back pack.

His first love note from a girl.

So it begins.