First

"I'm sleeping in my bed tonight," she announces, "because I'm in first grade, you know. So I'm going to be a big first grader."

And she climbs the ladder of her loft bed, disappearing under a mountain of stuffed animals.

"Where's Baby?

Her Baby is a small stuffed ballerina doll she was given by her grandparents when she was a baby herself. Back then, she would rub Baby's satin skirt and suck on her yellow yarn hair. When it became obvious that this doll was her "love object", as they say, we got three more of them. We learned with her older brother, whose love object was a stuffed white dog that later turned a shade of light gray, that a backup Baby was a good idea. She loved them all equally and used them interchangeably and still does, which I've since read is rare for kids to do. Usually they won't accept replacement love objects, somehow knowing which is the original by small details that we as adults probably don't notice. Now, the three remaining dolls (one was lost along the way, we don't know how or where) are named Baby, Jyleesha and Coyote. She always says, "Her name is Coyote for short." Short for what, she doesn't know.

I find one of the dolls on the floor and toss it up to her. "Which baby is that?" I ask.

She examines it. "This one is Baby. She has the hole in her skirt."

She settles into her bed, but then pops back up and stretches her arms down to me over the railing. "Hug?" she says.

I reach up to hug her and kiss her on her freckly, soft face. She says, "Mom, I'm getting pretty big now, so I have to sleep in here."

"Yup, you sure are." I say "But you know where I'll be if you need me, right?"

"Uh huh." she says.

I turn on her nightlight and her Shrek Party CD and leave her room. I'm thinking- hoping, really- that sometime in the night she'll climb down the ladder of her bed and up into mine. But she doesn't. In the morning, I joke, "Wow, I got the bed all to myself last night. Nobody hogging the squishy pillow or all the covers." She looks up at me with an injured look on her face and I wish I could take back the insensitive thing I've said.

"Well," she says, "I'm a first grader now. I'm getting big." And then she runs off to her room to get dressed in her blue uniform shirt. On the way, she slams her elbow on the edge of counter. She turns and runs back to me to rub it and examine it for her, and I feel like it's my chance to counteract what I said moments before. Like it's one more chance for me to appreciate how little she really still is.