Would You Like Some Flowers?

I have decided my girl is extroverted with a capital E! We went for a walk around the local university the other day, and I think it was the highlight of her week. She picked a bunch of the little white daisy-like weeds, and announced to me, "I'm going to give these to people I don't know!" I said, "Oh, reeealy..." thinking her plan might be for her to pick the flowers, but for me to do the handing off.

...so along comes a 20ish year old guy with ear buds in, dressed head to toe in black, with his shoulder sling bag on. Kendra jumps out from behind me, in front of him, pretty much blocking his path, and says in quite a loud voice, "Would you like some flowers?" She then proceeded to thrust her handful of smashed weed heads up at him. If he acknowledged her at all, it was a mumbled, "No."

The next unsuspecting people were professor-types, talking rapidly and walking just as rapidly. Kendra again jumped out, and nearly shouted, "Would you like some flowers?" while thrusting her handful upward toward them. They laughed politely enough and kept walking.

Now, I was ready to curl up in the fetal position and cry for my poor little thrice rejected three-year-old. But guess what? She wasn't fazed in the least. With trepidation, I suggested she might want to try offering them to a girl. (I was hesitant to suggest it, thinking, "What if she can't find a woman to take the flowers?") After a lengthy discussion about why a girl might like flowers more than a boy, she began scouting out her next prospect.

She finally found a taker, and I breathed a big sigh of relief. But the cool thing was getting to see how thick-skinned my little sweetie is. I think that ability to let things roll of her back just might serve her very well down the road!

Every time we came to an intersection of sorts, be it a walkway or street or whatnot, I'd let her choose which way to go. We could hear some sort of rally or sports event or something several blocks away, and she kept steering us in that direction. Our community has more than its fair share of demonstrations and such that go awry, so I eventually told her I was going to take a few turns picking our direction (so I could move us away from the increasingly loud group of people).

My first choice was to head down a quiet pathway between two buildings. As we started down the path, Kendra immediately said, in an informed yet distinctly disappointed tone, "Um, I don't think this is a good idea." "Oh, yeah? Why is that?" I asked. She said, "Because there aren't any people this way!" In fact, there were about 10 people on the path, but evidently that just wasn't good enough after having been shoulder to shoulder with skateboarders, bicyclists, girls with mounds of dreads using 5 gallon buckets as drums...

Now Kendra is telling me multiple times a day: "Let's go back to college!"