Fashion designer by default

What do major attitude and clothes decorated with pencil doodles have in common?

The past two weeks of school have coincided with a shift in Anika's behavior - she is fighting me at every turn, refusing to eat breakfast or dinner or anything that's not a snack, pushing back against bed time to the point where she's exhausted every morning and whining about how she can't absolutely can't go to school and she WILL NOT CANNOT STAND homework because "I know everything already!" She seems happy with her friends and her teacher, but is otherwise mum on school in general.

I've attributed this behavior to her being tired and being a six year-old-going-on-thirteen year-old with two very attention-grabbing younger brothers and one very maxed-out mama. But I've been perplexed by another habit that started with this school year: coloring on her uniform. Every day, her skirt (and sometimes her shirt, too) is covered in pencil doodles. Stars, loops, hearts, little people and stripes. They're not so much cute doodles as they are sketches that look like they're applied with swift, aggressive swipes, and they usually come out with a good scrubbing. When I question her about them, she looks at me and quietly says, while turning her attention to something else, "it's from my desk." Again, I thought this was a new phase and also something my artistic daughter would be prone to do. At homework time, she doodles around the margins of her paper and fills her desktop with pencil drawings. I just figured clothes were a natural progression.

I hadn't put the attitude and the doodles together until yesterday, when Anika's teacher pulled me aside at pick-up and said, "Have you thought about putting Anika in the gifted and accelerated program?" I told her that yes, we are working on going through the testing hoops to get her there, after which Ms. Garcia, nodding, said, "I have recommended her as well. My class isn't the right one for her. She's always the first one done, and she's always looking up at me, twirling her hair, like, what else do you got for me?" She laughed. "We need to get her into a more challenging environment."

I'm so glad Miami Dade schools offers a gifted program, and hope that we can get my little student into it ASAP.