10/11/11 - School Days

It’s hard to believe we’re already a month into the school year.  Eva is enjoying First Grade.  She especially likes the science experiments and learning about animals.   Right now she’s learning to write sentences with punctuation and to do simple addition problems. 

 

Amanda has her own preschool workbook she likes to do while Eva’s doing school work.  She’s learning to stay on the dotted line when she traces.   Bethany wants to do everything her big sisters are doing, so I give her pages from a coloring book that has letter practice at the bottom.   It looks like her sisters’ school work so she intently scribbles with a pen and proudly shows her work. 

 

At Monday School, Eva gets to go upstairs with the “big kids”.  She has three classes that she picked: “Bendaroo Biology” (learning about Animals using Bendaroos), “Ocean Life” and “Animal Adventure”.  I’m detecting a pattern of interest, here.  ;)  Amanda joins the Pre-K class and I stay with Bethany in the toddlers’ class. 

 

On Wednesday mornings Eva and Amanda take ballet, though we’ve missed the past two weeks due to a cold that just doesn’t to quit.  We’ve also missed Amanda’s library class and the AWANA club, but hopefully the runny noses will quit soon so we can get back in the swing of things.  Two weeks is too long to be cooped up indoors.  

Fun Times

Eva is very creative and loves to draw pictures or make cards.  She’s very detail oriented, wanting me to tell her exactly what certain animals eat so she can depict it correctly, or how to spell a word (though sometimes she guesses).   When the girls watch a movie, they like to act it out at the same time, and Eva plays director.  Sometimes they use their little toy animals (dinosaurs for “Land Before Time”, or dogs for “Balto”), but many times they play the parts of the characters themselves. 

 

Amanda always carries a toy animal with her wherever she goes.   It rotates by the day – mouse, frog, lion, etc. – but it’s always something.   We’re slowly building a collection of Schleichs, and whenever we go over to a friend’s house she immediately wants to play with whatever animals we don’t already have at home. 

 

Bethany loves to cuddle, so she tends to gravitate towards a toy doll our neighbor gave us that has a freakishly enormous head.  Not sure why she picks that one, but it appears to be her favorite.  She also loves music and will want me to put on a sing-along DVD about a dozen times a day, like Mary Rice Hopkins or Cedermont Kids.   These past two weeks when everyone was sick I quickly got tired of them, but Bethany still wants to hear them over and over.  

Changing Clothes

The great thing about having all girls is that clothes can be handed down.  I have Rubbermaid tubs full of clothes from newborn to size 6, all labeled and stacked.  The weather has turned cold again, so I’ve packed the summer clothes back into the garage and brought out the winter wear.  Eva is wearing size 6 tops right now (size 6 pants are still a little too long), so she’s wearing new long-sleeved shirts and dresses I found on clearance last summer.   

Amanda is moving up to size 4T, and though she likes the shirts and pants she’s inherited, she prefers dresses.   I’ve been buying every long-sleeved dress I could find in the second-hand clothing store for the past few months, and she’ll wear them even if they’re size 5 or 6 and the sleeves are too long, since she loves twirling in the long, flowing skirts. 

 

Bethany is a “girly girl”, too, but I don’t have any warm dresses in her size, so she likes to put a tutu or dress-up skirt over her clothes when she’s in the mood.   She’s barely 20 lbs, and her legs are so short she still fits in 18-month outfits with separate tops and bottoms.   Her torso is too long for one-piece outfits that are 18-months, so I’ll put her in 24-month outfits and roll up the sleeves a bit.  I prefer to put her in one-piece outfits right now because that way she can’t take her diaper and pants off.   

Petite

Bethany is so tiny for her age and has dropped well behind the growth curve trajectory she had for her first 6 months of life.   Once I started introducing solid foods, her growth rate slowed down dramatically, and we haven’t been able to pin down why.  We thought eliminating gluten after she tested positive for gluten intolerance would get her back on track, but her growth remains slow.   We had her tested for food allergies and did a blood test for thyroid, iron, kidney and liver function and hormones, and everything has checked out fine.   Her development is on track except for her size and weight, so I guess she’s just petite.  

Bethany Turns Two

Bethany turned two on September 19th.  We had a small party with friends and gluten-free cupcakes.  It's hard to believe we don't have a baby in the house anymore!  It's funny to think that if we were still following the pattern of the past few years (a baby every 26 months), we'd have another one by November!  Instead, I've put all the maternity and nursing clothes away for the first time in 7 years.  

The crib has been packed away, and Bethany now sleeps like a big girl on the bottom bunk.    But her newfound freedom has meant that she pops out of bed like a Jack-in-the-Box when it’s time to go to bed.  Once she finally goes to sleep, though, she typically stays in bed until early morning.  She’s been fully weaned for a couple of months, but she still likes to wander down the hall around 4am, crawl in our bed and cuddle. 

 

During the day, Bethany is a typical 2-year-old fighting for independence.  She gets into anything that’s not locked up or put up high.  I have to cook using the back burners because she likes to stand on a chair to reach things on the counter or get a better view of what I’m doing.   We had to put the diaper pail on the top bunk because she started getting into it, pulling dirty diapers out and bringing them to us. 

 

She figured out how to take her diaper off and likes to sit on the toilet like her big sisters, except she’s afraid of the hole in the seat, preferring to perch on the rim.   She hasn’t figured out how to go yet – just likes to sit there and pretend.   Last week she wouldn’t let me put her diaper back on and spent almost an hour just sitting there, before she decided to come out to the living room and peed on the carpet next to the couch.   Yep, not quite in tune with bodily signals yet.   I’ve resorted to putting her in one-piece outfits with snaps so she can’t pull her pants and diaper off and have another accident.  

Pushing Buttons

With the return of the rainy season, I decided to get a used Wii as a way to get some indoor exercise.   I found one on Craigslist with a Wii Fit Board that was barely used, and the girls love it.  Amanda’s favorite game is sword fighting (she calls it “knocking people off into the water”), and she’s really good at it.  Eva prefers the baseball and bowling.   Bethany will take a dead remote and follow along with her sisters’ motions.   

 

Bethany loves anything with buttons, so we got her a toy laptop and she loves to pretend to type on it.  She’ll hold the mouse to her ear like a telephone, so it appears hers is a hybrid model of some sort – half phone, half computer.   Still, she has a lot of fun with it. 

Toddler Chatter

Bethany is learning to say a few words now.   She calls me “Maw-yee” (it sounds like “my” with a drawn-out southern drawl) and Dave “Da-yee”.   She can say “bye-bye” clear as a bell, but usually only after we’re loaded in the car and the person she’s waving to can’t hear her anymore.   Eva will coach her and can get her to sound out words better than anyone else.  

 

While her vocabulary remains limited, she definitely understands what words mean.  If I tell her simple instructions like to put her dirty clothes in the hamper or find her sippy cup, she knows exactly what to do.   She nods or shakes her head and has no problem making it clear what she wants.   Her favorite strategy is to pat my arm or leg until I follow her, where she’ll point to the desired object and emphatically yell “Ah!”