Emily finished her year of Thursday School. She loved going to class each week and if we missed one she talked about going the next week. She loved that Elena was in her class and she could spend time with her friend. She loved taking her shoes off when she was at school. She was sad during the cold months when she couldn’t play outside. She enjoyed being a part of deciding what to wear to school and picking shoes each week. She never came home with a clean shirt, dress, or hands – always a bit of her art work came home on her. She loved having her special lunchbag and backpack.

It sounds like the first few weeks of school were a little rough for her. She would shutdown if she didn’t get her way, which happened each week. When she figured out how class worked and about the rules she then took off in the class. She was active and participated a lot. She also wasn’t shy about offering suggestions to the class about things. She liked her teachers and the activities especially the ones that involved dressing up. It was a joy to drop her off at an activity she enjoyed so much!

For the closing of school they had a special presentation. Each of the classes went up on the stage and sang three songs. There were such cute antics in each of the grades and I could only imagine what Emily was going to do. When it was time for her class to preform she had plenty of funny things to share. Emily proceeded to talk during the presentation to the teacher, announce that she wanted to sing by herself, she found her parents and grandparents in the audience and stood and waved, she announced that the group was singing too quietly and that they should start again, and she did some of the hand motions of the songs. I was glad to see that she had her own individual spirit among the group and enjoyed that she was able to share it with everyone else.
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Mr. John, one of her teachers, wrote about the class and each child in the class. The following is an excerpt from his essay pertaining to Emily and Elena.

“This year’s class of 2-year-olds at the New York Avenue Church of Christ Thursday School was a surprisingly congenial group. Perhaps it was the absence of redheads and identical twins, or the fact that 5/8’s of the group had names starting with the letter E, but for some reason, this class was altogether easier, more peaceful, less physically contentious, and (dare I say it) more mature. If last year’s class was like a think tank, this year’s was like a weekly group therapy session.

Emily is one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met, a complexly cerebral child whose intellectual cup runneth over. Comfortable all alone in the topsy-turvy playroom, sitting at a little table with an inert toy computer, she would appear to be video conferencing with 2 or 3 colleagues in distant locations, playing all the parts herself, a la Gilda Radner. Occasionally cantankerous and often goofy in a way that she personally found very entertaining, she was also quite inseparable from her sorority sister, Elena.

Elena seemed always to be bathed in the soft, diffused natural sunlight that illuminates faces in Vermeer paintings, such was her blending of reflective, diminutive, classical beauty, quiet happiness, and good manners. The word “cute” fits Elena like the word “agile” fits a hummingbird – not as adjective but as essence.

Elena and Emily liked to go down the playground slide side by side, holding hands.”