12:19 lunch date

Today is my daughter's birthday. She is seven years-old and Jeff and I had the honor of peeking in on her life at school. She asked us to eat lunch with her and so we did. We picked up some McDonald's and put on a badge and waited for her in the cafeteria.

We did get to see Tristan finishing up his lunch. Doing the boy thing by trying to shove the last six inches of his footlong hot dog into his mouth so he could go to recess. It did make us happy to see that there are "lunch monitors" who excuse the kids to recess when they are done. They have a neat system that keeps the chaos controlled by having numbered rows of tables for each class. There is a continuous flux of kids coming in and eating and leaving for recess. Pretty cool.

Well at 12:19pm Trinity and her friends made it in. Since this is the first year she is at Roosevelt Elementary, I have been concerned that she doesn't have a group of friends, but it ends up that she does. While Jeff and I sat down with her to eat, eventually one by one, Jeff got pushed off his side of the table to make room for another of her friends that needed to squeeze into the group of smiling girls. Pretty soon we sat across from seven girls who eat their lunches and shared their food with one another. A cupcake went to the left, a cracker sandwich to the right.

Next to me sat a boy from our neighborhood who is in Trinity's class. He announced his presence by saying "Trinity hates me". I know Alex and that he is a handful, so I tried to start up a conversation with "I'm sure she doesn't hate you, why do you think she hates you?" All the girls were a twitter, "He chases us", "He tries to kiss us", "He thinks we are his girlfriends"... Seven little heads were nodding all over the place.

That led to who was who's girlfriend/boyfriend. Everyone LOVES Neilson (Little boy in red shirt eating grapes) but really he isn't a nice boy.... just cute.

The whole time I was just aglow, because of the simple reason that Trinity's friends were a little rainbow! Blond girl next to her, Mexican girl on the other side, Asian girl next, etc. No longer is she the only girl with dark hair in her class. She is exposed to diversity.

For about 25 minutes I got to experience her world. Little did I know that I would get a gift on her birthday.