(I’m aware that it’s technically the day after Valentine’s Day…)
Yes, that is a shirt with a sheep that says “I (heart) ewe”. A Christmas gift from Uncle Dan and Aunt Genevra. Though I would totally have bought it myself if I had seen it! After all, that’s what mommy knitters do!
Would you believe this little girl has been mistaken for a boy every. single. time. she’s worn this shirt?!? What, only boys can wear green?
This morning I sent Carrie off to school with her hand-made Valentines:
These can be summed up in one word: MESSY. Good gracious, I think I’m going to be finding glitter from these for the next several months! And I think I’d get card stock for next time. We used construction paper, pre-cut heart doilies, little heart confetti bits and glitter, but the amount of glue involved caused the construction paper to curl a lot. Maybe card stock would stay flatter?
I traced the hearts, Carrie cut them out. I applied the glue, she stuck on the doily and added more glue on top to help the confetti and glitter stick. Oh, and before the whole messy gluing bit I wrote the recipient’s name on the back, along with “Love,” and Carrie alternated between writing “Carrie” and “Carolyn” depending on her mood. Except for one or two that are signed “Carriolyn” because she just couldn’t decide…
Dear Anna,
Today you are seven months old. That sounds so much older than six months, though of course it’s not really that much older! It’s been quite a day – Mommy’s car has gone over 50,000 miles and we refinanced the house. You had your first breakfast out today – you were so proud to sit in the restaurant high chair like a big girl!
You’ve entirely skipped pureed food. You hate it. (Except peas.) But the pears and peaches you spat out like we were trying to poison you? You love them as little bits of cut up canned pears and peaches. I’m trying to convince myself that nutritionally it’s not much different, since they’re just canned in pear juice. Your favorite foods are now: freeze dried apple bits, puffed rice cereal, bits of canned pears and peaches, diced cooked carrots, and bits of banana. I’m struggling to find other finger foods that are age appropriate – I guess maybe we could retry sweet potatoes and squash cut up instead of mashed.
You are also on the move. You roll, pivot and inch yourself forward. And new as of today: you get all the way up on your hands and knees and rock back and forth. Your big sister did this just days before learning how to crawl, so I bet you’re pretty close. You can sit in the “tripod” pose for a while before you fall over, and you love this new way you can play with your toys.
You still don’t babble. At all. But I’m about 99% sure you’ve signed “milk” a few times – although you don’t do it all that consistently yet. I’m not too worried about the babbling, as you are a very vocal baby and definitely respond to sounds. Actually, I think you’re starting to connect words to people and things. If I ask you where “the big sister” is, you look around until you find Carrie.
Sometimes it seems like you’re growing faster than I can keep up – I just finally got all the 3-6 month clothes out of your dresser and put in the 6-9 month clothes…and some of those are already too small! And we installed your new convertible car seat and put the infant seat away. You love your new seat! Whenever anyone looks at you in your new seat you grin at them like “Look at me! Look how big I am!” Same with the “new” stroller that lets you sit forward and look out at the world instead of just laying there and watching me. You just seem to really be blossoming and loving every minute of becoming a big girl. Seeing how much you enjoy every new thing makes me look forward to all the new things you’ll get to experience in the next few years!
Love, Mommy
Yep, that’s right, six weeks of posts just suddenly appeared in your RSS reader (all 5 of you still reading this, that is.) I could blame it on the kids, or I could blame it on playing Animal Crossing for a bit each night, or I could blame it on the knitting…
But the reality is that I’m just too good at procrastinating. I could blog on time. Honestly, I do actually write the posts out on the day they say they’re from, for the most part. But then sometimes the posts need pictures and the idea of finding the camera, taking the pictures (if they’re not already taken), finding the card reader, importing the pictures, editing them, uploading them and putting them in the posts? Not so appealing.
And then what happens? I get disgusted with the lack of updates and finally decide to just bite the bullet and do all the posts at once, which involves piecing together which pictures were really meant to go with each post (and deciding that some just don’t need pictures after all) and then all the photo editing, which altogether takes much longer than it really needs to. (And that last sentence was really much longer than it needed to be as well.)
However, since this blog has become my children’s baby books – as the likelihood of those ever getting done is slim-to-none – I need to be better about maintaining it. So, maybe we’ll call it a Valentine’s Day resolution? (Not that it’s Valentine’s Day yet…I’ll just start early for once.)
Oh, come on, we live in Rochester. Was there ever any doubt that the groundhog would see his shadow? There’s always six more weeks of winter from today. It’s just whether there will be six more weeks after those that’s in question.
I always feel like such a neglectful mother, keeping my kid (now kids) out late at a superbowl party, but since Anna fell asleep while we were there and Carrie wouldn’t be sleeping until 10 or so at home anyway, we decided to stay for the whole game and hang out with friends we don’t get to see very often.
My favorite commercial? The Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head one. (Was it for tires or brakes or something?) Oh, and the game was good too. (I was, as always, rooting for the Bills. We all know how that turned out.)
And we brought our new favorite potluck dish and addicted a few more people to the yumminess that is the soy-ginger dressing.
Anna is a very strange baby. So far, she has tolerated avocado and sweet potato, turned up her nose at rice cereal (who wouldn’t?) and oatmeal, and outright hated applesauce. She likes butternut squash. And she loves puffed brown rice cereal (she can feed herself this, but prefers it when I stick the pieces in her mouth for her so she can gum them)…and peas.
Yep. Peas are her new favorite food:
…Peas. Tasty and good for your skin!
(All jokes about pea-encrusted babies aside, who has ever heard of a kid who liked peas and not apples?!?)
Yesterday was the parent/teacher conference for preschool. And one of the main points the teachers wanted to get across was that Carrie is a really good reader. Well, of course, I knew that. But no, reading – and understanding – chapter books at four is not just early reader material, it’s way more than that. And they’re concerned that she’s going to have a hard time in kindergarten because there won’t be anything at all to challenge her.
I wasn’t all that concerned until they got me worrying about it. I mean, there’s lots of things that kids learn in kindergarten besides reading, right? Social skills, writing skills, tying your shoes (oh, that’s actually probably something I should teach her here at home, I guess), getting through a whole day without mommy or a nap. Right?
So I used a couple of different homeschool tests on the web to see whereabouts her reading level might actually be. Are you ready for this?
She’s reading at a fourth grade level.
Um. OK, then.
I’m choosing not to completely panic, but I think I will make a couple of calls to the school and just try to find out how they might handle a very advanced early reader. It’s not as though we could (or would) skip her up to first grade anyway, so I think I just need to have a basic comfort level that they’re not going to completely ignore the fact that she can read and will find ways to channel it so that they don’t have to chastise her for reading whatever they write on the board instead of sitting there sounding out individual letters with the class.
Dear Carolyn,
Today you are four-and-a-quarter. You wanted to know if that was almost like four-and-a-half, but it’s not. You should still tell people you’re four. Really, you only get to be four once, please try to enjoy it!
So, sleep. We talked about this last month. I thought maybe we’d found a solution with the sleep fairy CD, but after I posted about it last, you absolutely refused to listen to it that night. And the night after. And pretty much ever since then. But sometimes you do manage to sleep, except of course on those nights when you don’t.
You’re dealing with a slight (OK, maybe more than slight) bug phobia right now. To the point where we have to go upstairs and do “bug checks” multiple times before you’ll fall asleep, and you’ve woken me up out of a sound sleep several times screaming that there’s a bug crawling on you – in your hair, on your leg, wherever, and I have to check you all over (including getting out the comb and picking through your hair) to assure you that there are no bugs. From what I’ve read, this is quite normal at your age, to have a fear and have it be all-consuming. That doesn’t make the reality of it any easier – for either of us! No amount of reassurance that January is not a terribly bug-friendly month, or that bugs are so much smaller than us that we terrify them, or any such thing has worked so far.
But aside from that, things are great. You’re loving school, loving being a big sister, loving life in general. You really enjoy playing Animal Crossing on the Wii – actually, as games go it’s probably a great thing for you to play: there’s a lot of reading, some money management skills, and plenty of virtual gardening.
I’m still getting used to your short hair. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but I do look back at pictures of your long hair (especially in braids) and kind of miss it. But neither of us miss the tangles and the twice daily battle to try to get a brush through it. Daddy thinks your short hair makes you look younger, but I think it makes you look older. You definitely could pass for a kindergartner now. ;)
And speaking of kindergarten…I can’t believe I’m even starting to think about kindergarten for my baby girl, but here we are. Registration is just six weeks away, and I bet before I can say “my cute kindergartner” three times fast I’ll be putting you on the bus for your first day of school. I’m going to pretend I didn’t just type that, and go back to living in denial for the next few months of preschool. You know, the days can seem really long, but these years are flying by so fast it takes my breath away sometimes.
Love, Mommy
I dropped Carrie off at school today and then went out for coffee and hit Target for some necessities. Except for driving Carrie to her swimming lesson yesterday – after which we went straight home because I was so exhausted – this is the first time I’ve left the house since Anna’s appointment on the 12th. I could do without being that sick again for a very, very long time! Now I have to play catch up with everything I didn’t do last week (and the week before when Anna was sick.) Where did January go?!?