Passions

In her short life Z has a a series of passions, and they are still standing.

Her first passion was being read to. Even as a baby she would want me to read to her for hours at a time. When she started crawling (around 5 months) she would crawl to her bookshelf and bring me book after book.



When Z was 2 1/2 she feel in love with the Buffy musical. she would demand we listen to it in the car over and over again. Soon we let her start watching episodes, though we skipped some that we thought were too scary or too sexual. Here is her the Hannukah before she turned 3 holding up the newest Buffy DVD collection. She was so excited! She used to sing Spike's song and Buffy's first song over and over.

We are now, as a family, watching the whole series again - I think it is the third time for Z. Buffy is an amazing program for gifted kids. The whole vampire thing is just a metaphor for highschool and Buffy's super powers are really about being gifted. Joss Whedon the creator is obviously brilliant.

Sometime after Firefly came out (Z hasn't seen that yet) we took her to a convention and she got to see Joss Whedon, she really wanted to sing to him but she didn't get a chance.



I am not sure when Z got obsessed with Harry Potter. Probably before she was three. I got the first book on tape from the library and we listening to it in the car and then I let her watch the movie. She _loved_ it. Through books on tape she soon caught up with the series.

Last summer when the 6th book came out she started her most famous game (remember Marianne?) The Harry Potter Thinking Game.

It is like twenty questions only you can only ask about something from the Harry Potter universe - with the books being cannon. And you get more than twenty questions.

It starts with one person thinking of something and then saying "I got it" and then the players ask "It is a person?", "Is it a place?", "Is it a magical creature?", "Is it a magical object?" etc.

That game has taught Z a lot about reasoning. And she has amazed me with her knowledge of the books. (except that time she thought Tonks was a guy)

That summer Z went with us to the big Harry Potter event at Barnes and Noble and stayed up till midnight with the rest of us to stand in line and get the book the minute it came out.

Later that summer she wanted to try reading the books on her own. I was really surprised. But she did. At first she was so excited she would come out of her room (she read at night before bed) and tell us every time she finished a chapter. One night I heard a noise in the house and found that Z had gotten up and turned the light on in the living room and was reading Harry Potter at like 3:00 in the morning. She said that she had woken up and was too excited about what was going to happen next in the book to go back to sleep.

I was kind of proud of her that night, being the bookworm that I am. But for her own health I told her to go back to bed.

She went on to read the first three books one after the other but got bogged down in Goblet of Fire and never finished it. Since then she has read the first book two or three times, the second book twice and is now reading Azkaban again.

Her room is covered with posters from the movies. She saw Azkaban on opening night and got a free poster for being one of the first ten in line a the theatre. Somewhere she got a poster for book six.

Last Halloween she dressed as Hermione.


Perhaps Z's greatest passion has been music. It seems like she has been singing her whole life. Actually on a certain gifted board Z used to be called Poetry because she made up poems all the time. But soon she went from singing other people's songs and making up her own poems to making up her own songs.

She loves musicals - first were was The Music Man and Guys and Dolls. Then the Buffy musical, Little Shop of Horrors, and Snoopy. Then she was all about Les Miserables and I mean that. We eventually took her to see a live production in San Francisco. Her favorite song was Young Cosette's Castle on a Cloud. Then she got really into Javert. She talked a lot about why he would kill himself. I swear that musical taught her so much about the human condition.

Last summer for my birthday we went to see her next most favorite musical, Wicked. Guess her favorite song from that one. Popular? No. It was No Good Deed. That girl has a natural dark streak. Here is her dressed as Elphaba



She also loves movie scores. She said when she was three that she wanted to be John Williams when she grew up. :) I don't know that many people who spend their allowance on movie score cd's let alone kids her age.

When she was 4-ish she asked me to teach her to play the piano. Heh. I really couldn't. So she started trying to teach herself. even from what little I knew I could tell she was fingering the keys incorrectly and that worried me. So I tried to get her lessons. The teacher, who was referred to me by the parent of a Davidson child, said that she didn't usually take children that young. But she took Z and since October she has been taking lessons.

Sometimes I worry about the amount of time she spends on her piano practice, but it could be just me because Z's not complaining. I love it best when she makes time to compose, and she has been doing more and more of that lately.



One more thing that Z enjoys is acting. Is it a passion? Sometimes I am not sure. But she does like to act out everything that enters her world. She loves pretending to be other people and even has a cute fake British accent. Today she was reading her script of Shakespeare again and acting out all the parts. It was cute. Here she is as Snug the Lion.