Petra is 12!

It’s sort of hard to believe she’s 12. In many ways, she’s still very much a little kid, playing weird pretend games in the forest with her friends. In more ways, she’s so grown-up, planning and executing complex projects with little to no input from me. She organized and planned her own birthday party, built a complicated Halloween costume, and did a lot of the heavy lifting on this year’s egg hunt.

Petra is constantly building and engineering things, both in Minecraft and in real life. She had an idea to make a toad house and a bird house in her pottery lessons, and researched the sizes these things should be (including calculating shrinkage) and where to place them.

Petra can cook whole meals for the family on her own, which is a treat for me. She doesn’t exactly do it all that often, but the fact that she can, or that I can get things near done and hand off to her if I have to run to rehearsal, feels like such a huge life boost.

Petra is the escape room MVP. Her brain is quick to see patterns and make connections. I am in awe of how she pieces things together. I really want to take her to one of the high-quality escape rooms in bigger cities. She’d love it, and she’d probably crack it in record time.

This year, she has aggressively clicker-training the cats (Hairy will come when called, even outdoors, which is truly impressive! Clementine and Porco will sit, pop up, and shake). She’s so consistent about everything to do with the cats, even helping us manage Hairy’s complicated medical needs. She can be firm with them but also so loving. They don’t get away with anything, but they know they are adored.

Her art continues to amaze me. In addition to pottery (where she has now added wheel throwing), Petra paints, draws, and makes… wee little things? She works in a lot of different media and often has interesting ideas of how to mix them.

Petra worked on props and set things for Finding Nemo and Zombie Prom at the Wayne. She enjoyed getting to build big, and being part of a process like that. She also helped me a bunch with strike for my shows. I don’t know if she’ll ever want to be on stage, but she’s an enthusiastic and appreciative audience member and a skilled and creative designer.

She and Silas are working together on an absurdist musical, The Adventures of the Amazingly Head-Decorated Blank. I don’t fully understand what it’s about, but there’s a character who likes to burst out of piles of things, which is pretty fun.

Petra is also a solid science nerd. I’m always amazed at the things she knows, and I have no idea where she learns them. She listens to podcasts, she reads Scientific American, she asks questions at Forest School. And some things, she basically intuits from putting together all of her random inputs.

Petra is a voracious reader, with a wide range of interests, from manga to novels to nonfiction, Whenever we’re in a new place, she wants to visit the library.

One thing I love about Petra is how broad her interests are. When I was a kid, I felt like I needed to pick between being into science and being into the arts—or maybe, on some level, because I was good at writing and theater, that I couldn’t be good at science and engineering. Petra doesn’t have any need to put things in a box. She uses natural materials in her sculpture and painting. She draws animals and plants and tries to make them accurate—even fantasy animals, she’s really thinking about how their skeletons could work.

Silas recently told me, “Petra is really fascinated with mushroom rings lately. I think she either wants to be a mycologist when she grows up, or captured by the fey.”

I shrugged. “Why not both?”

And that pretty much sums up Petra at 12.