"Ribit, ribit, ribit...*sniff*...ribit, ribit, ribit."

Enduring the final stages of a head cold, Rachel Norton maneuvers a neon orange frog across the wooden coffee table, its synthetic feet hitting the surface with each "ribit".

"Is that a tree frog, Rach?" asks Daddy, lounging on the plush ivory carpet a few feet away, attempting to be amusing. "Where's its tongue?"

The girl stops her toy mid-leap and looks at her father. "It's only plastic," she informs him, her expression serious, as though she believes any fool should know that a pretend frog cannot open its mouth and stick out its tongue.

"This is a tree frog," she continues pointedly, pressing her finger to one of several figures lined up in front of her. "And this one is a Brogger frog, and this one is a Newikan frog..."

Perhaps you have never heard about these rare types of amphibians. Don't worry. She's making them up.

"And this one is Mockie, and this is Minnie, and this is Mecko!" She finishes proudly and grins at her parents, knowing perfectly well that everything she just declared was, as she would say, "silly".

Rachel is four years old.

She is kneeling beside the coffee table, dressed in a matching tank top and shorts the color of the sky on a cloudless day. Tiny pastel flowers -- blue, pink, and yellow, plus a few green leaflets -- decorate the clothing, and white socks peeking out of velcro Lion King tennis shoes complete her look. Her newly-cut blonde hair stops just below her chin, framing her delicate features and bright brown eyes.

The Austin home of Rachel's grandparents erupts into chaos any time the whole family assembles. On this sunny Saturday afternoon, everyone is gathered in the living room, surrounded by a colorful array of rubber reptiles -- snakes and lizards, along with the frogs, ranging from green and brown to fluorescent pink -- that sixteen-year-old Uncle Matt brought from his place of employment, the "Everything's a Dollar!" store. Mommy and Grandma, unable to appreciate the modest price of the two fairly realistic 4-foot-long snakes, are seated together on the sofa, a safe distance away from the foul creatures.

"Eeeeeheee!!" Squealing with laughter, Rachel abandons eight frogs that are "sleeping" in the table's floral centerpiece, noticing that her dad has wrapped one of the snakes around his arm, the red body and white underbelly twisting around him like a candy cane. "Oh, Daddy..." she giggles, reaching for the serpent. "Sometimes my daddy's so silly."

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, Rachel secures her pink Barbie backpack around her shoulders and prepares for another day of social and intellectual development at Anderson Mill Christian Academy, where she is one of twelve students comprising Mrs. Guinn's 1999-2000 preschool class.

"Daniel...Elizabeth...Brianna..." Rachel pauses, struggling to recall each of the kids' names. "Joshua is already five so he had to go to kindergarten."

Make that eleven students.

"Jacob, he's a little wrestle-y. The teacher is going to take away his chair. Ummm...Kayla, Anna, Dylan..."

Nicholas is a boy who sits at Rachel's table in the classroom. "He shoots baskets," she had announced to her mother after returning home on the first day of school.

"Eric...and...and...Caroline!" the little girl exclaims, the final name successfully revealed.

Her lively imagination deciding that answering my questions is too boring and that there must be a better way to give me the information I seem to want, Rachel propositions me, "Hey, let's play school!" She jumps up and down, bubbling with excitement, those brown eyes begging me to say yes.

"Okay," I agree, allowing her to escort me to a dark green Victorian-style chair in the corner of the living room.

"Now, you sit here, and the other kids will sit here." Rachel extends her arms to the imaginary students occupying the carpet around my seat. She walks to the opposite side of the room, then strides back toward me and shakes my hand, professionally introducing herself, "Hi, I'm your teacher."

Rachel explains that when everyone arrives in the morning, they stand with their right palms over their chests and left hands behind their backs -- to this she adds a rigid demonstration of the position, resembling a miniature soldier -- while they face the flag. "The Christian flag, and some other flag, but I don't remember what it's called."

Trying not to laugh, amazed at my own surprise that such a common symbol is unknown to someone, even to a child so young, I suggest, "The American flag?"

Her face lights up. "Yeah, that's it!"

"And what do you do while you're looking at the flag?"

"Say some words, but I can't remember the words." Rachel shrugs. I smile, imagining a group of four-year-olds trying to pronounce the word "indivisible", much less being able to understand what it means.

Shortly after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, after deciding what month it is, what day it is, and what season it is, the kids participate in their first class of the day -- phonics. Classes last only fifteen minutes and are pretty self-explanatory: phonics, handwriting, numbers, art, reading group, music. Rachel's syllabus can make a person long for the simplicity of childhood education: September 7 - 9: Colors. September 14 - 16: Shapes. For the Spring semester: January 18 - 20: Senses. January 25 - 27: Transportation.

"Capital 'E', little 'e'," Rachel's diminutive voice sings, beautifully in tune and keeping a rhythm that stresses every other beat. "'E' says 'eh' as in el-e-phant. 'E' says eh, eh, eh."

It is currently 'E' week in phonics class.

A devout lover of music, Rachel continues the song until she has proven her knowledge of each letter she has learned during the three weeks school has been in session. Approaching my chair and planting her nose two inches from mine, she proudly repeats the chant.

"Capital 'U', little 'u'. 'U' says 'uh' as in umbrella. 'U' says uh, uh, uh."

"Capital 'I', little 'i'. 'I' says 'ih' as in Indian. 'I' says ih, ih, ih."

After we have increased our knowledge of the alphabet, Miss Rachel asks me to identify the color of every object in the room and demonstrates the complexities of counting to twenty-five, and then it is time for "lunch".

"Hey, Rach, what do you want to drink with your dinner?" Daddy suddenly calls from the kitchen, breaking into our fantasy world.

"I want 7-Up!" Rachel yells back. She is still for a moment, her mind searching for the point of her game which was interrupted.

"I know!" she cries victoriously. "Lunch will be...over here." I start toward the bottom of the staircase that she is pointing at, only to be stopped by her frantic "wait!"

"What?"

"We have to line up. You be the boy line leader, and I'll be the girl line leader. Jacob is usually the boy line leader, but he's sick today, so you'll have to be the boy line leader. Now, there's no talking in the halls. Some of the boys are noisy, though. Sometimes we get stickers, but last time all the girls got stickers and only one boy got a sticker, because the boys weren't being good. They were wrestling. They always do that."

Rachel finds her father's baseball cap and perches it on top of her head. "I'm a boy teacher now."

How does a four-year-old pick up on gender roles so quickly? A few weeks into preschool and already the girls are stereotypically "good", while the boys are stereotypically "bad." The boys and girls have to get into separate lines to go to lunch. A hat makes someone a male teacher. Sure, Daddy wears baseball caps, but Mommy also wears them at times. Rachel's exposure to media is limited to children's television shows, most of them animated, such as Little Bear, Sesame Street, Wimsey's House, and Blue's Clues. The majority of the characters are not even human, and they certainly are not involved in male-female romantic relationships. Yet Rachel lines up four frogs on a chair and proclaims, "The frogs are lonely. Maybe they'll find girls and marry each other."

When asked to elaborate on that statement, she only replies, "They're all alone but maybe they'll find a girlfriend."

The remaining four frogs are scattered about the carpet. Rachel gathers them together, then methodically places one "female" frog in front of each "male" frog that is already on top of the chair. She arranges them in distinct pairs, the members of each couple facing one another, as if engaged in conversation, or kissing each other.

They grow up so fast.

In ten years, Rachel will come home from school raving about the cute basketball player that sits next to her in class, her blonde hair curled just a little too much, her dress just a little too short. Her favorite television shows will upgrade from cartoons to 21st-century versions of Beverly Hills, 90210. (Please, no...) Her expressions of annoyance will grow to involve words more advanced than "Tanzunk" and gestures more offensive than "flicking" -- repeatedly balling her hand into a fist and then releasing it, fingers pointed angrily at the wrongdoer, usually Mommy or Daddy. One day, she will join the ranks of the "grown-up" world -- the stressed, the heartbroken, the popular or the unpopular.

For now, her Pre-K innocence is the sweetest joy in the world to observe. Smiling brightly and singing loudly, Rachel dances around the carpet, performing the "Hello Song" she learned in music class:

"Hello, hello, it's music time today -- we laugh, we're here, it's time to stay and play! We clap our hands [clap clap clap], stomp our feet [stomp, stomp, stomp], turn around, touch the ground! Hello, hello, it's music time today -- we laugh, we're here, it's time to stay and play!"

Author's Afterword:

Going into this project, I did not have any specific ideas about what concepts or events I would be writing about; I only knew that I wanted to tell the story of a small child. The notion of profiling another person usually brings to mind interviewing someone with an extraordinary story and putting it on paper, but I find that in adulthood the simply beauty of living tends to get lost in the jumbled mix of school, work, relationships, and yes, extraordinary stories. Therefore, my objective was not to speak with an adult, but to spend time with a person who has not yet been exposed to all of life's hardships and create a narrative describing what is important in this world from her point of view. Accordingly, my subject is four years old.

To obtain the information I needed, I spent a day at home with Rachel's family. I simply took notes on every word the child spoke, every move she made, and later arranged those notes into the above narrative. I was not looking for anything in particular while making my observations; the marriage issue came up randomly, and I used that to form the basis for my title and my eventual reference back to it in the ending paragraphs of the story.

Because I chose to do this story on a child, this article was the most enjoyable to write of the four I produced this semester. Not only was the experience a lot of fun, but it illustrated that some of the best stories come from ordinary people living everyday lives. One minute I'm playing school with a four-year-old; the next minute she is insisting that it's necessary to marry a member of the opposite sex in order to avoid loneliness. Now, isn't that more interesting reading than some mass-produced Hollywood article?