It’s not a good picture, but it encapsulates everything that I love about my little girl and, as she grows, this image will remain emblazoned in my memory: a little girl, all alone in the goal box, shivering in the pouring rain. Taylor plays on a soccer team with girls two years older than she is, and she is the youngest in her class at school, but it never comes up much in discussion. She silently (or obliviously) accepts the challenge and rises to it. She has always been quietly tenacious, unassumingly dogged, in her pursuits. 
My little girl never quits, and her persistence has taught me volumes. I remember the time her eyes welled with tears as she tried to conquer jump-roping. But she practiced for hours. And then she got it. Only then did she venture out of her room to share her new talent with others.
She learned to read at an early age, which is absolutely no credit to me. She just decided that she wanted to do it, and she didn’t stop until she had mastered it. She used to tell me she was going to play “school.” Only later did I realize she was painstakingly copying books, word for word, in her own scribbled hand. She read everything she could lay her eyes on. She wrote and wrote and wrote, on every empty surface (much to my chagrin at the time).
That is my Taylor in a nutshell. I have therefore concluded that, left to her own devices, she will be a superstar. My only job is to get out of the way and let her go.
