… or the March 4 post covering February 2016. I’m less than a week late! Woohoo!

The enthusiasm for Star Wars continues. One day I did her hair in the three bunches Rey has, and she was thrilled. Then she found a stick, and said, “Rey has a stick. I have a stick, too!”

I was excited to show the kids the new Finding Dory trailer, because Finding Nemo is one of our favourites, and we’re planning for Finding Dory to be the first film Owlet sees in the theatre this summer. She was so thrilled about the trailer and the plan that she started telling everyone at school that she had been to a movie theatre, and was going to go after school, and… right. This is an excellent example of the kind of magical thinking she engages in. Her educator usually checks with me at the end of the day to confirm various facts, because Owlet’s make-believes are so detailed and sincere that it’s hard to separate what’s imagined and what’s fact.

Also, she says “movie heater” instead of “movie theatre,” and while it is utterly adorable, we suggested we call it the “cinema” instead, which she readily accepted. It’s much easier for her to say.

The kids both saved up their money and they each bought a new playset for Disney Infinity this past month. Sparky bought the Rise Against the Empire set with Luke and Leia, and Owlet bought the Inside Out set with Joy and Anger. (I love that my kids are willing to buy toys that they intend to share and can both play with.) She was so excited to put her money in a little wallet, find the playset in the store, and carry the bag after buying it. This is the second thing she has bought with her own money (the first was a Periwinkle doll from the Disney Fairies line) and it’s been interesting talking to her about how to save money and consider what to spend it on. There have been serious discussions about how yes, she could take the money she currently has and buy X, but she was saving that money to buy Y, and if she spends what’s currently there then she has to start all over again if she still intends to purchase Y.

Her colouring majorly leveled up this past month — her colour choices, control over colouring specific small regions and staying inside lines has suddenly improved. Drawing has also leapt up a level; wow, her flowers and people! (I can’t find any of her recent people, unfortunately; I think she gave them all away.) More adding landscape and/or environment to the basic picture: those are fish all along the bottom of the water fairy’s picture on the left and bubbles around her, and flowers around the garden fairy on the right. She drew frames around them both.

This month’s music classes introduced the recorder, the clarinet, and the transverse flute.

And during the last one, the flute class, she actually paid attention. Sort of. At least she didn’t whine and try to climb all over me.

The children have a new musical obsession. Ceri bought me the Hamilton cast album, and that has mostly replaced Hunchback as what they ask to listen to in the car. Owlet says, “Can we listen to the one where they say, ‘What’s your name, man?’“) and wanders around the house chirping, “Alexander Hamilton… my name is Alexander Hamilton…” to herself.

I cut Owlet’s hair again a couple of weeks ago, and I cut off more than I intended. She likes wearing it loose and down, and it was getting in the way everywhere, so I told her she needed to start agreeing to having it pinned back or we could trim it. She immediately chose the cut. We discussed how much to trim; she wanted it shorter, just above her shoulders, but I wanted to be sure there was still enough length to do the Elsa braids she asks for periodically. So I put it in a ponytail and misjudged where to cut. Stupid rookie mistake. Anyway, it’s shoulder length, and the curls are already bouncier (although not as bouncy as they were when they were originally that length), and it’s exactly where she wanted it. I’d cut three inches off just before Christmas because the ends were getting scraggly; that was her first real haircut other than bangs. This was another two and a half inches gone. Eek. It just feels cumulatively drastic.

And then she didn’t want me to take a picture, or to go to school the next morning, because she was afraid people would laugh at her because we cut her hair. I can’t even. How can this start so young?

Storytime! Sparky has started to read the Geronimo Stilton and the Kingdom of Fantasy series to Owlet. It’s hard to get them both wanting to do it at the same time; Owlet often asks and Sparky says no because he’s not in the mood, but when it happens it’s terrific. (Psst, this is the new haircut, too.)

We finished On the Banks of Plum Creek and began By the Shores of Silver Lake. It was hard for Owlet to wrap her head around the idea that four or five years had passed, Mary had gone blind in the interim, and there was a new baby. (More than that actually happened during that gap; the Ingalls family moved a couple of times, and there was a son born who died at the age of nine months.) We tried starting Anne of Green Gables, but it’s a bit wordy for her, so we switched to Winnie-the-Pooh.

Owlet’s educator told me something a couple of weeks ago that I have to share. The kids are all currently into pretending people are in trouble and swooping in to save them. The gym set is the safe zone, and the mats under it are the water they’re in, or the quicksand, or whatever. Well, one of the kids found Owlet on the gym set and said, “You can’t be here, no one saved you!”

“I rescued myself,” Owlet said. (I can just imagine the unimpressed look she gave the kid over the top of her glasses as she said it, too.)

.. also known as the February 4 post covering January 2016.

Owlet’s current passion is Star Wars. It’s all Star Wars, all the time over here. Which is fine with the rest of us, to be honest. She’s excited by anything Star Wars, but especially BB-8 and Rey. (Has she seen the latest film? No. Doesn’t matter.)

As you may notice, her colouring has leveled up; she’s really focusing on more precision. Colouring Rey alone wasn’t enough here; she drew a BB-8 in the upper left, embellished and expanded on the line-art house for Rey, added a sunburst thing behind her head, and a landscape. (And then she put some Disney Fairies stickers on it, because who doesn’t like fairies, right?)

She’s a fan of R2 but to a lesser degree than BB-8, calls Threepio “Key-Threepio,” and is enthusiastic about Rey’s friends Finn and Poe Dameron. Lots of what she knows about Star Wars comes from playing Disney Infinity with Sparky. They have watched some SW: Rebels in French on weekend TV, so she thinks Sabine is awesome as well, and is an enormous Ahsoka fan. Sparky gave her one of his Jedi starfighter toys plus his Ahsoka figure, and she was thrilled. They play Star Wars together a lot.

Her daycare was closed for a week at the beginning of February, and because it was deadline time for not one but two projects I was handling, she had a couple of days at another home daycare run by someone who trained at our regular daycare. I told her we’d pack a lunch for her to take, which necessitated a lunch box, and she asked for one with BB-8 on it. Well, the lunch box manufacturers haven’t stepped up their game and started producing Star Wars: The Force Awakens gear yet, so I searched everywhere and eventually found this tin box at Michael’s for her. She was super excited, both about the lunchbox idea (we’ve told her she’ll use one in kindergarten, so this was an early treat), and also because, well, Rey and BB-8 are both on her lunch box, how cool is that?

There’s been an increasing amount of acting out at daycare and her new music class: no focus, whining, pouting when she doesn’t get to do what she wants right away. I realize that sounds minor, and kind of to be expected with kids in general, but it unusual for her, and it’s frustrating.

Speaking of music class, this past month she was introduced to the violin, where the only successful thing she did was tuck it under her arm in rest position:

… because of course she knows how to play a violin, right?

She missed the class where they met the viola, but the next one was the double bass, which she didn’t like; she kept crawling into my lap and hiding her face in my shoulder, saying that it sounded angry.

Favourites music-wise these days, she is all about the studio cast recording of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which is an excellent reworking and expansion of the songs and score from the Disney film (and story, thankfully; the production team accurately called it “a Victor Hugo adaption with the score of Disney’s Hunchback“), but I am getting very tired of it, because it’s all the kids ask to listen to in the car. I am all for introducing new musicals to my children, but I have a saturation point.

They did a unit on arctic animals this past month at daycare. Here’s some art, which she further embellished when we brought them home. There’s a bonus whale with a googly eye in the polar bear one, and a puffin egg in the arctic fox one. (Apparently puffin eggs are bright red. Keeps them from getting lost in the snow, I guess?)

We finished reading Little House on the Prairie and are now reading On the Banks of Plum Creek, which she calls “Mary and Laura in the Deep Deep Deep Underground House” (which makes it sound more like a bunker than a sort of basic hobbit hole). We just read about the grasshopper disaster and it took her a bit to fully understand what losing the entire crop of wheat meant for the family. Mary and Laura have also just started school at this point of the book, and she was quite interested in that, and the interaction between the different children there.

On the way to and from daycare each day, we pass where she’ll be going to school this fall. “There’s my kindergarten!” she says each time. And since the name of the school above the front door also has the school board symbol, when she saw that symbol on Sparky’s most recent report card, she said, “That’s from my kindergarten!” Not yet, child. Let’s not rush report cards for you just yet.

Or, the December 4 post covering November 2015. I lose track, so I figure you do, too.

The big accomplishment this month was that Sparky taught her how to play video games, and now she pesters him to play Disney Infinity (we have the Avengers set, and she likes playing Hulk, which is hilarious) or Skylanders (which is on the way out popularity-wise in this house, thank goodness).

We finished reading Little House in the Big Woods, and have moved on to Little House on the Prairie. Or, as Owlet calls it, “Mary and Laura on the Prairie.” It pulls no punches as it begins. I forgot that their dog vanishes during the unexpectedly dangerous creek crossing and is assumed drowned; I had to reassure Owlet that the dog wasn’t actually dead. There was a long discussion about what actually happened and why Ma and Pa were so scared about the creek suddenly surging in a flood while they were fording it, because it’s never explicitly described in the text; you just get Laura’s version of how it felt and sounded from inside the floating wagon.

(Also, wow, my respect for Caroline Ingalls has deepened now that I’m rereading this series as a mother. Sure, Charles, let’s leave a perfectly good house and support system and travel west for weeks in a wagon while we have limited food, in unknown, unpopulated country, while dragging three young children with us. Different times, I know, but when she says “Whatever you think best, Charles” I hear “Nothing I say is going to change your fool mind, so I’m going to conserve my energy and focus on keeping myself and my children alive.” And then their new home turns out to be three miles into Indian Territory and they have to up stakes and move AGAIN within the year.)

Owlet’s been fussing about choosing music to fall asleep to, taking longer and longer to decide, so one evening I made an executive decision and put one of of my playlists for her to listen to. It’s called ‘Ethereal Elf,’ and it’s all the elf music drawn from the LOTR and Hobbit scores. She wanted to know what it was, so I told her.
“The music sounds sad,” she said.
“It is,” I told her. “It’s about a beautiful e!f called Arwen Undomiel, also called the Evenstar. She is sad because the world is changing, and because she misses someone she loves very much.”
“Who is that?”
“His name is Aragorn. Good night.”
“But Mummy, how is the world changing? Why is it changing?”
“Well, it’s the nature of life to change. Change often isn’t good or bad; it just is. Good night, sweetheart.”
“Is Aragorn dead? Is he an elf, too?”
“I am not summarizing the entire Aragorn and Arwen subplot from the LOTR Appendices. You can read it yourself when you are old enough. I love you; GOOD NIGHT.”

This month she drew this charming picture of Jiji, starting from a circle someone traced on the paper for her:

And I leave you with this delightful exchange, which occurred when Sparky tried to tell Owlet a joke at the end of the month:

Sparky: Hey, what has two humps and is at the North Pole?
Owlet: An envelope!!!
Sparky: …
Sparky: No, a lost camel.

The joke totally lost all steam after her answer, because it was more out there than his punchline.

I lost another month. Thanks, insane work rush. So you get the September and October posts combined into one.

We’ve reversed the order in which we pick the kids up, so I collect Owlet first, and then we go get Sparky together. Every day she races toward him, arms outstretched, and throws them around him, laughing. Sparky’s not as thrilled — he has begun to enter the ‘must not look dorky in front of my friends’ stage — but it’s sweet to watch. She blows him kisses through her window every morning when we drop him off, too.

Owlet went apple picking for the first time this year. It was terribly exciting (albeit quick; turns out it doesn’t take long to fill two 20-ish-pound bags of apples when you have four people picking). We went back again about three weeks later, because this house is pretty nuts about apples and the first round was gone.

Back with all her friends at school, everyone has leveled up after the summer. Owlet’s new interest in writing actual letters (thanks, new glasses!) means that she is the first of her age group at school to voluntarily write her name on her art. Other things we can attribute to the glasses include a dramatic improvement in the fine motor control required to colour inside lines.

I’m loving how she can draw expressive faces on things all of a sudden, too.

Her current favourite movies are Bolt and The Nightmare before Christmas. I recently surprised them with Ponyo, one of the lesser-known Miyazaki movies, and she adores it. (Big surprise, I know.)

In music, she’s very into the soundtrack to The Nightmare before Christmas, which she calls “Christmas Halloween” (and that’s as good a descriptive name as any). She can also sing the Game of Thrones theme, which is HRH’s ring tone and alert. It’s a bit disconcerting to hear her humming it while she plays with her Playmobil in her room. (Exactly what is going on in that storyline, one wonders.)

A newly acquired skill is the ability to twist open Oreos, a triumph after asking me to do it for her since she started eating them. It’s the little things. Another impressive skill she has recently demonstrated is how she has an argument. Instead of just yelling or screaming over someone else, she actually discusses how she feels and listens to the other person in order to work things out. Her friend Audrey has been raised in a very similar way, so to hear the two of them have an argument is adorable. One will say, “I feel like this when you do that,” and the other will say, “Well, I feel like this,” and they talk it out, sometimes with parental input regarding solving the problem. It’s the politest argument ever.

Her grasp of French is improving, too, thanks to a new francophone girl at school. The kids have been learning the basics to speak to her — bonjour, merci, au revoir — which are adorable to hear chirped by Owlet. The other day I taught her how to say ‘cookie’ in French, and the way she pronounces it is both hilarious and appropriate if you love cookies: “Biskwhee!”

I’ve given up on the matching and laying out of outfits. One morning a couple of weeks ago she stuffed the two choices we put out for her back into the drawers and chose her purple skirt with the multicoloured hearts on it, a black and white striped top with a flower on the shoulder, and a pair of red leggings. I’m pretty sure her educators figured out preschooler fashion sense years and years ago. (Dresses are where it’s at. There is minimal unmatchyness with a dress.)