Since a few weeks Rosalie lived, to her great joy in a beautiful detached house on the outskirts of the village. It felt to her, as if she was now the girl next door at Bloemenhof.

Patrick and Bea also found their way quickly and well. That wasn't so difficult because they both worked from home, enjoyed the surroundings and the contacts with the Bloemenhof family, and saw that their daughter was very happy.

The only thing they wanted to change had to do with their work. They did administrative work, mostly focused on finances. They enjoyed it, but felt that it was not quite what they wanted to do for the rest of their lives. They longed for an opportunity to interact more naturally with people in their work, to live together with people.

They were relaxed about it, sometimes browsing the internet and newspapers, but refused to rush into anything new. Huib had strongly advised them to wait for something with which they really experienced a click, and they certainly wanted to follow that advice.

In addition, they did not yet have the opportunity to work together outside the home, because they had not enrolled Rosalie in a new school. The child was like a sponge that sucked up information. As a result, she learned well and quickly.

The stories Bea had started writing to help her learn to read were soon no longer needed. Rosalie joined the local library, where she could walk to, and where she could be found several times a week. To her delight, library staff had asked her a few times where her father or mother was, or for who those books she picked up were. In their opinion, something was not right. This girl was clearly a preschooler and came to the library on her own anyway. And the books she was getting were actually meant for children who were years older.

Rosalie had come up with a nice tactic. If someone told her she had chosen books that were too difficult, she would flip open a book and then read the first part of the book aloud. No one got it, but the staff grew to like the girl and treated her kindly.

About numbers Rosalie did not worry at first, until she read a book, in which it seemed to be very nice to be able to do math after all. She started adding quantities herself. Once in the past she had been given blocks, but she had never done much with them. Now she used them to do math: two groups of blocks, which she counted separately, a group of five blocks and a group of three blocks. Then she pushed both groups together and counted the blocks again. She deliberated within herself: five and three together was apparently eight. After a few times she did the addition in her mind, without looking at the two groups of blocks. Only then did she slide the blocks together and count the whole thing to see if her answer was correct. After an hour she was tired of the blocks and asked Bea if she could do the same on paper. Bea searched the internet for a while and found some math sheets. She printed them out and gave them to Rosalie, who went through them at a rapid pace. By mid-summer she was counting to one hundred, and with the help of equal groups of blocks she had discovered what multiplication meant.

Rosalie noticed that her parents got a lot of information from the Internet. That fascinated her. She regularly stood next to them to see how they managed it.

Patrick was on to her and asked her if she wanted to try it for herself. Yes, of course she did! She sat down in front of the computer and started looking for the letters she needed, while Patrick explained that the letters on the keyboard were capital letters and which lower case letters they belonged to. Even though she found it a bit difficult and was slow to get going with two fingers, she found a lot of information about all kinds of subjects she liked. If she wanted more information about a farm, she would search for that word. Patrick taught her how to open sites in a new tab. Rosalie devoured the information she found.

Patrick and Bea consulted with each other: Rosalie was on the computer so regularly that they themselves had less time for their work. They bought her a laptop, which Rosalie put to use with great joy. She put it in a standard spot, on the corner of the dining table. It was becoming her own research environment!

There were two things she found irritating, however. Typing did go faster than on the first day, but she really wanted to type like her parents, with all fingers. Bea showed her how to place her fingers side by side in one row, and from that point she could hit all the letters. While Rosalie tried, Bea looked on her own laptop for a course that might help her daughter get started. She opened the link on Rosalie's laptop and showed her how to get started. Rosalie was ecstatic! She flew through the lessons, started writing bills to her parents in a text file and letting them read it. Of course, Patrick and Bea thought that was great. They gave Rosalie an email account and pointed out how she could send them an email. To Rosalie's surprise, replies soon came back. She had noticed, that when she moved her mouse to an icon, a word usually appeared, making her understand what the icon was for. That's how she found ‘reply’. She wrote replies to her parents and clicked send.

"How did you manage that? How did you know how to send an email back?" asked Patrick in surprise. Rosalie shrugged, showing him how she had searched with her mouse.

The second thing she found awkward was that she wanted to write, just with a pen on paper. It occurred to her that maybe she could find that on the computer, writing lessons. She discovered that there were different letters: writing letters that had to be joined together, and block letters that came loose next to each other. She thought that the writing characters were pretty, but too posh. She decided to copy the block letters. Bea and Patrick were amazed that she was able to transform the letters from books into block letters. The 'a' from a book she wrote as a ball with a stick on the right side, exactly as it was taught at school and as she had discovered it on the internet.

Patrick and Bea kept a close eye on her, that everything kept coming from Rosalie herself and if she was happy. Until today, in the middle of August, they had not been able to discover any hitch. The child had fun in schoolwork that she chose herself. She also enjoyed cooking with Mom and baking cookies with Dad and gardening together, asking all sorts of questions about plant names, what to do and why. She followed them, picked up what she was interested in and developed from within, and by living with her parents.

In between she asked almost every day if she could visit Margreet and Huib. The first time, when they had only lived in their new house for a few days, one of her parents had walked with her. The second time Rosalie pointed out to them, that she did not have to cross the street, that she could just walk over the sidewalk to the guesthouse. She could do it quite well on her own! Patrick was fine with it, although he did look her over the first time she went alone.

"Unbelievable, only four years old..."

To chapter 243. New life

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