Kallie was gifted. Of course, Alice and I had suspected that from the very beginning, but she was really advanced in just about every way. She was scooting around at almost two months before she was expected to, and she was able to hoist herself up to a standing position by holding onto something. By the time she was six months old, she was pulling herself from piece of furniture to piece of furniture in a standing position. It wasn’t exactly walking, but we knew she wasn’t too far from it. I was glad we’d put in the padding stuff before she’d come home.

Alice and I wanted her to have as much exposure to and interaction with other children as she could. Since she wasn’t yet potty trained we couldn’t exactly enroll her in daycare, and while letting her play with Angelica was nice, we felt she needed more than that. So, when she was around seven months old, we started to look into different parents’ groups around the city.

Tina suggested the group she and Bette had gotten Angelica involved in at about that age. Alice finally relented, although she was somewhat against the idea of taking Kallie to an institutionalized sort of thing like that. She said it was a little too much like a class, and she didn’t want her daughter in a class at seven months old. I agreed, but since we’d been unable to find anything like what we were looking for, we decided to give it a try.

I didn’t think it was too bad. All we really did was sit in a huge circle and someone would sing a song. Kallie didn’t seem too enthralled, but she was good like she always was. She played all right with a few of the other kids, but she didn’t seem to really be having any fun, and I felt like we were stifling her a little with all the sitting in a circle stuff.

“I think she’s a little too young for this sorta thing,” I whispered to Alice.

“Totally,” came the response.

“Let’s go get some ice cream and go to the park or something,” I suggested in the midst of about twenty different parents talking at once.