Adventures in Sisterhood. Hey, I Have a Little Sister!

At the Lloyd Center after ice skating--welllll, ok, it was more like ice walking but whatever

In this week's mentor adventures, I will try to convince Edith to climb a tree. A few months ago I convinced her to eat a crepe—she whispered she might puke, but luckily that didn’t happen. Nope, instead she ate a sliver of the $8 ham crepe and decided she preferred the M&Ms on my frozen yogurt. This was after we had spent an hour traipsing around the Portland Art Museum and hypothesizing about paintings, with her shirking at all of the naked women. She’s afraid of most things, BUT, I expect as much from someone who’s about a yardstick tall.

Edith doesn’t talk a ton, but when she does she asks a lot of questions, which means I answer a lot of questions. When I was told my mentee match would be an 8-year-old, my immediate response was to Google “8-year-old.” (How tall is one of those anyways?) Youtube gave me a good idea of what they sound like. The first time we hung out, we discussed law enforcement: I still don’t know why policeman eat donuts, and our own Grandpa was a policeman. 

She had stumped me, just like when we went to the park and I crushed her three times in a row (<--haha, get it?) in tic-tac toe; I considered letting her win, but thought it best to teach her the harsh realities of life, early on. “It’s ok,” she said after the fifth round, “I was letting you win.” I’ll be damned…by letting me win, she ended up winning. So, ok, she’s smart.

When I first met Edith, almost a year ago, she wore her hair pinned back in baby clips, though now she has bangs that are brushed to the side, like Selena Gomez. Katie Perry is her favorite singer, and Beyonce is her favorite performer (two different things, she informed me). She does not like Michael Jackson—even post-mortem, I feel relieved by this preference. She spends a lot of times indoors playing video games, and I have to rapidly change the subject if she gets on the topic of French fries (this happens more often than you’d think). She’s gained some weight since we started hanging out; her belly bowls out under her T-shirts now—which unfortunately is a very familiar site. Basically, she’s a Latina version of my own 9-year-old self; having a miniature-sized doppelganger can be very unnerving, but also enlightening.

Apparently the Portland public library does this program where you can sign up for a time slot to read books to underprivileged dogs (yup). I’ve been wanting to do it for a while. If I can’t get Edith up a tree this week, we’re going to the library.

-J

p.s. It has been two months since the last post, you steenking slackers!