First off, thanks to everybody who left comments on that last post. I’m still trying to figure out my best course of action with Catie, but it helps to have other opinions, whether they’re giving me new ideas I hadn’t considered, or just reinforcing what I was already thinking. I’m very grateful.

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After all of the agonizing I did about Catie having to read in front of her class, when I picked her up on Tuesday, I asked her how it went.

She said, “Huh? Oh, it was fine. Everybody did a big clap for me when I finished.”

Totally nonchalant. Just, oh yeah, I did that, no biggie.

I am both unbelievably relieved and completely confused. That girl is a study in contradictions.

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Last night was Halloween, and like last year, we took the kids trick-or-treating in my parents’ neighborhood. Catie was a dinosaur (again – I think this is her 4th Halloween as a dinosaur), and although I’d planned to let Lucy be a dinosaur too, she decided on her own that she wanted to be a princess. So she was.

My mom made the princess dress for Catie when she was 3. She hemmed it shorter so it would fit Lucy, and made a new headband crown (since I couldn’t find the old one), and we were good to go.

Lucy lasted maybe 5 or 6 houses before she was done with the whole trick-or-treating thing. I think it was a combination of being out at night and being expected to talk to strangers, it just overwhelmed her. My mom took her back to their house, and she helped them pass out candy to trick-or-treaters, which was much more her speed.

Meanwhile, Chris and I took Catie through the rest of my parents’ neighborhood, and she hauled home a metric ton of candy.

She had a blast.

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Also on the subject of Catie: as long as I can remember, she’s been saying that she wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up. Then yesterday, out of the blue, she said, “Actually, I might have changed my mind. I might be a paleontologist, but maybe I could be a geologist. Or an art teacher. Or a pilot.”

I told her those are all great ideas, but that she has a lot of years to figure it out.

Then she said that she might be all of those things and do them each on a different day of the week. I told her that sounded like a life where she would never, ever be bored.

Really, what more can you ask for than that?