Xan

Clara has a new best friend. Xan, who is just a few months older than Clara, has taken more than six months to warm up to her. He is very attached to his mom, but recently he has come out of his shell a bit and has started playing with Clara. They are best best friends. It is really adorable. His dad snapped this picture of them "reading" to each other.

Clara is thrilled to have a friend her age, instead of always being the youngest of the bigger kids. She definitely has a bit of the stalker in her, though, as she had previously demonstrated after Christmas when she missed Molly and spent several days making piles upon piles of pictures for her. Anyway, recently I had given her the Griffin and Sabine books to look through, and she decided she wanted to make a book full of envelopes with letters to Xan, and so she sat down and wrote him about twenty letters, most of which had some variation of:

TO:XAN
FROM:CLARA
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.

(I have translated these from her phonetic spellings and random word placement. Even she has trouble reading her own letters).

Bridges moderated her impulses and created a notebook with pages of envelopes, and they have been exchanging the notebook and filling it with a new letter each time. It's very cute.