Morgan Leigh

Movement defines Morgie. In her school portraits, she sits listlessly, staring warily at the camera. It's in moments like that, when she's nervous and shy, that people get the wrong picture of Morgan. They have to see her move to know the person. She loves to dance, and it's when she's twirling around without inhibition that you see her soul.



Morgie, who turned 11 on December 10, still skips to her own beat---a beat only she can hear. At any moment, she'll throw her arms around you, tell you she loves you, then do a little hoppity-skippity, walking dance out of the room.



Thoughts boil around in Morgan's head, but we only see the bubbles on the surface. If you're quiet and patient, you can catch her giving a cooking show to the kitchen window, or diving into the YMCA pool again and again to save Ron Weasley, Hermoine or Cho from the merpeople. It's a great gift to carry your own fun with you wherever you might go.



Of course, an over-active imagination can be a burden, too. Every muscle twinge or gastronomical rumbling foreshadows a bout with cancer. Every blemish turns into a tick burrowing into your skin. Hearing a news report can be sheer terror when the world's woes are applied to you personally. Luckily, shadows only appear where there's bright light, and dark thoughts don't last long.



Morgie will remember 2007 as the year she first stepped on stage. This fall she auditioned for a local production of "The Miracle on 34th Street" and got several small parts. Her four or five lines of dialogue were deemed just right for a debut appearance. And, although she occasionally assumed the look she has in her school portraits, family critics declared her performance superb. At the very least, she got an insider's look at how a play is put together. She has already declared her intention to be in the next production.



Although she can make a mess with the best, Morgie likes to help around the house. She does the fun stuff like cooking and baking, but she'll also pitch in with dishes and cleaning up, often----and here's the shocker---without being asked.



A voracious reader, Morgan finished the Harry Potter series this year and almost immediately began reading it again. In between, she's gone through the Spiderwick and Lemony Snickett series, with single titles in between.

Before you picture her as a pure intellectual, I've been instructed by one of her sisters to note that Morgie also watches too much TV.