Our Little Debutante: birthday gal, feather boa model, and playground hegemon

She turned four yesterday, an event which was marked by a short birthday wingding with a half a dozen local kids, and not one, but two feather boas (pink and purple, respectively). I will be cleaning up the damn feathers for weeks.

She attends pre-K several times a week for two or three hours and was the queen bee of her class--functioning as the playground hegemon in the foreign policy sense: setting the norms, enforcing the rules, and ruthlessly discouraging the rise of peer competitors. This balance of power worked well for the last several months but now some of the other girls are challenging her rule and O.L.D. does not take competition well. Should be interesting to see how it turns out.