So a longtime friend of mine emailed be yesterday asking for the blog link because he’d lost it, and I decided to try to start up again. I quit for a while because we had a bit of a family tragedy; we had to put 2 of our beloved dogs to sleep, and I didn’t really want to face it. And honestly, I still don’t, so I’m not going to write about it right now, but I am going to write. Or try.

It looks like I haven’t written since March. At that point, Charlotte was just starting to get interested in letters. I got her the Leapfrog Talking Letter Factory on DVD, and then downloaded it and soon the Talking Words Factory for her Leappad, which she plays with/watches in the car home on our commutes. And between that and starting Montessori again in late Feb, her interest in letters and numbers was sparked and has not abated since. She went from not only not knowing ANY letters or numbers but also having zero interest, to knowing all upper and lowercase letters and all of their sounds within a month or two. And now her favorite game is “_____ starts with _”, and she’s even started sounding out a few easy words like “at” and “up” and “red”.

She’s also gone from being a straight up die hard scribbler to starting to draw actual things. Or at least to copy them. I can definitely say that fine motor skills and art are not her forte’, but she can kind of sort of mimic a smiley face when she feels like it, and copy a few letters J. Yesterday she had her 3 year doctor’s appointment. (Oh, yeah, and she turned THREE!!!!! Unbelievable!) Anyway, she is 37” tall, 29 pounds (barely), and I forget the head, but it worked out to 45% height, 29% weight, and 90% head LOL. She’s always had a substantial noggin. The doctor was very impressed with her conversation and said that she knows that “redshirting” is a trend right now but she really would advise against holding her back from Kindergarten even if she is small and has a summer birthday. She said she would be very bored (and probably will be anyway).

More importantly, I was really proud of her behavior in the waiting area. They had a rug with roads on it and a little wooden play toy in the middle and she wanted to play with them with the other kids. She said, “Mommy, may I play with those?” “As long as you can play nicely and share with the other children, you may.” Not only did she play very nicely, she went into her backpack and found a few little toys I didn’t know were in there (a little car, a farmer, and a cell phone), and SHARED them willingly with the other children. And at one point she had given all three toys away and she said, “Oh, no, there’s no toy for me.” I said, “There are three toys and four children. That is a problem.” She said, “I’m sure someone will share with me soon.” OMG she’s growing up to be such a sweet kiddo!

She does have some issues. Her attitude lately has been atrocious at times. She has developed a really harsh, hateful tone of voice, especially when yelling “NO!” I have been working with her on it, though, asking her to really stop and think about whether she’s using a nice, gentle tone of voice or a harsh, mean tone of voice, and the past few days have been much better. Hopefully it’s relatively short-lived and not part of the treacherous threes I keep hearing about (Terrible Twos, Treacherous Threes, WTF Fours lol). But boy, overall she really is turning out to be a very thoughtful and considerate girl, and I thank my lucky stars (and God) that she’s in my life.

OK, hopefully we’ve gotten caught up. I’ll probably do a photo dump post or two or three also just to document those. We did go on a short trip to Chicago recently and are in the process of building a tree house, which is an adventure all to itself.