There’s good and bad to this. Getting the good out of the way first, she’s definitely not as shy as she used to be. And she’s made a couple of adorable little friends, most of whom have curly hair just like her.

The bad will take a little longer to enumerate. First, she’s a yakker. And she’s had to be separated from her pals a few times over the last couple of weeks. Second, she hasn’t played the yakking game very well. She tends to do most of the yakking when she should be listening and learning. She’s not the only one guilty of this particular crime in her class – the yakking disease seems to be contagious.

And although she’s a yakker with her friends, she still doesn’t participate very much in class. The teachers are having a difficult time evaluating her progress because she clams up around them.

Needless to say, I’m a little concerned, mostly because she’s going to be so very young when she starts kindergarten in the fall. She’ll first be turning five about a month after school begins, so she will definitely be the youngest in her class (hell, she missed the cutoff by three days). I want her to be as prepared as possible for the onslaught of public school.

We talked to her tonight about doing a better job of listening to her teachers in class. When she realized that we were gently berating her, she started running away and talking gibberish. No big surprise there, either. This is a work in progress and it’s going to take a lot of time. And a lot of deciphering gibberish to make sure she’s processed the message.

A few weeks ago, however, we found this cozy pink hat. Sophie liked the hat, in theory. ‘Cause it’s pink. But when it came time to actually use it, the fact that it’s pink didn’t give the poor hat any noticeable advantage over all of the other rejects sitting in the closet.

That is, not until we were in the Poconos last weekend and Sophie experienced truly frigid weather for the first time. Suddenly, protesting the hat didn’t make much sense. And over the course of an afternoon, she grew to love the hat.

She grew to love the hat so much that when we were unable to locate it the following morning, she cried and cried. As if a dear pet had died. We went to the hotel gift shop to buy her a new hat. But she hated all of them them. Either they weren’t pink, or they were itchy or just plain ugly. She was stubborn about it, too. We told her no hat, no snow tubing. But she just continued to sob. I told her she could borrow my hat and we bought one of the ugly hats for me to use instead. One day she’ll appreciate the things her parents sacrificed for her.

After shelling out the $10 for the ugly hat, a miracle happened. We retraced our steps to the theater we were in the night before. The cleaning staff had already straightened up and we were told that if they had found the hat it would be in the lost and found. But we had already checked lost and found and it wasn’t there. I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d forever lost my cozy hat to my little girl when, upon exiting said theater, Sophie’s chapeau was sitting on the podium by the door, in all its pink glory.

Cheers all around. And a smiling Sophie, who will never take her pink hat for granted again.