Category Archives: The Girl

Fall Extracurricular Classes

Yes, it’s that time once again!

I had to switch my time slot for cello, as we were looking at registering Owlet in an intro to music class at Preville, the arts centre with which Sparky does his summer camp and art lessons. With two kids doing extracurricular activities on Saturday, I either needed a second car or to switch my lesson time. And since a second car isn’t in the budget, I worked out a new slot on Friday at midday with my cello teacher. (This means working on the weekend if necessary, but ehn. If I have to, I will.)

I had my first lesson yesterday, and the work I did on the Vivaldi sonata over the summer wasn’t a complete waste of time (go me!). I didn’t get a debrief of the concert and assignment of summer homework in a final lesson back in June, as schedules didn’t align, so I just guessed and went with it. My teacher congratulated me again on a terrific recital performance, and asked if I’d seen HRH’s recording of my solo Bach yet; I had to admit that no, I hadn’t, because as happy as I was with my performance, I haven’t had the courage to sit down and watch it. I got two stickers in my book for it, though! (I am in my forties and still like getting reward stickers in my music book, thank you very much. It’s the little things.)

Orchestra also began this past week, although I had to miss the very first rehearsal because of work (hey, there, busy season and rush jobs and everyone needing everything tomorrow morning). The upcoming programme looks terrific: some Debussy, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky miniatures, a Mozart overture… stuff I’ve enjoyed playing before, a couple of new things. Our annual membership fee has increased by 40%, which is ouch even though the reason is valid (our conductor, who is excellent, has until now been accepting payment way lower than other orchestras of this level are paying). My individual lesson fee has also increased; I suspect I’m going to have to make a compromise somewhere, maybe by dropping one lesson a month.

Sparky is now in Cycle 3, and that means band at school! It’s wind and brass instruments, so right now he has been trying to get sound out of the headjoint of my flute to see if that would be interesting for him. If not, he thinks either trumpet or trombone would be fun. We shall see what happens there.

I went to the Preville open house this morning (with Megan! and I ran into my friend Adelina, whom I haven’t seen since we did our workshop on alternative-spirituality parenting discussion at the Yule Fair a few years ago!) to see what was on offer. We got to see and say hi to some of the teachers we’d become familiar with over the summer at day camp, which pleased Owlet. In the end, she will be doing her intro to music next semester; this session, it’s all about art, thank you very much. (That’s what I get for suggesting she move on to explore other tables rather than just standing at the intro to music table, banging the little cymbals. We then had to pry her away from the glue, feathers, and Plasticine.)

She also totally schooled the violin teacher as only a four-year-old can. He showed her how to rest the instrument on her shoulder, and she sighed and said, “That’s not right.” Then she lowered it and held it vertically in front of her. “No… that’s how you hold a cello,” he said, a bit puzzled. “Well, yes,” she said, giving him a flat stare, and you could tell she was thinking, ‘Seriously, dude? You teach this stuff? Everyone knows you hold these things like this.’ One small victory in a world where most kids call violas and cellos ‘big violins.’

So both kids are now registered in their respective art classes. Sparky is delighted (I am not entirely sure why, but he thinks both he and his sister taking art with the same teacher, albeit at different times, is terrific) and Owlet is looking forward to it as well, because (quite apart from the exciting making art thing) her friend Audrey is in the class with her. And I’m looking forward to not having to drive 45-60 minutes first thing on Saturday morning and then be focused enough to play cello and process musical instruction for an hour on Saturday mornings, then drive another 60 minutes home. Everyone wins!

Owlet: Four Years Old!

Owlet is FOUR!

Okay, the biggest thing this past month was the glasses, coming in right under the wire three days before her birthday.

She got her first bike for her birthday! It’s a stride/balance bike. We probably could have gotten her one with pedals, but the weight of those plus learning how to pedal, plus the not-such-a-success of that with Sparky… well, when I found this balance bike at a super awesome price, we chose this route.

This past month she also decided to start using my fountain pens! Proud mum, right here.

We’ve been dropping Sparky off at camp every day, and Owlet is very taken with one of the teachers who staffs the sign in/out desk. This woman happens to be Sparky’s piano teacher, so we are very interested in piano all of a sudden. She’s taken to asking to watch videos on YouTube of little kids doing their Suzuki book 1 recitals, mostly piano and violin, but she sometimes asks to watch cellists, too. I inquired (iron, hot, etc) and the teacher said they like to start them around age 5, around the time they’re learning to read, although it depends on the child; she had a 4 1/2-year-old who had just started, for example. But she told me about an intro to music course the arts centre runs for three- to six-year-olds, which covers rhythm and movement, and every week they learn about a different symphonic instrument. (This is convenient for them to do because the arts centre teaches all kind of music lessons with various instrumentalists.) So we’ll hit the open house the weekend after Labour Day and check it out. They start violinists as early as three years old, though, so if Owlet is utterly taken with that at the open house… well, we’ll have to see. I think the intro course is the best bet for now.

Owlet is super into crafts these days. Her drawing has improved and focused, and her scribbles are resolving into recognizable things. She drew me next to a present for my birthday, and there’s even a multi-layered cake up top:

(What is everything else? Who knows. Fireworks?)

She also uses her art to charmingly inflict guilt for no apparent reason. “See? This is me. I’m crying. I’m crying because you made me so, so sad. Those are tears on my face. In the rain.”

She had the last two weeks of July off daycare, and there were many trips to Michael’s for craft kits and art supplies. I still find it mildly amazing that I can set her up at the table on her own, and she can glue things to other things and cut stuff up with her plastic scissors. Like this dragon. It may look like a warped Tonka truck to you, and indeed that’s what it was intended to be. Part of her ‘happy vacation’ goodie bag from school, it started out as a huge sheet of card stock with punchout pieces that you fold and slot together to make a 3D truck. She sat down with her little plastic pinking shears at the kitchen table and cut it all up, then used a glue stick to put pieces together to make a dragon.

As of her annual checkup, she is 17.1 kg (that’s 37.7 pounds) and exactly 100 cm tall (one meter, yay!). She’s wearing between size 8 and 9 shoes, depending on the style, and size 4 or 5 clothes. (Except the 18-24 month leggings she wears under her dresses; they’re like knee-length playground shorts, and I never thought she’d fit into them again, but she has stretched out and slimmed down so much that they have a second life.)

She’s in a weird limbo between needing a nap (or else she’s whiny at 5 pm) and needing to not take a nap so she’ll actually fall asleep before 9 pm. Bedtime has become a challenge, with several calls for water, a trip to the bathroom, someone to rub her back, and general whining. She doesn’t nap at all at home; we’re looking forward to the preschool nap being phased out and evolved into quiet time instead. Then she’ll go to sleep on time at home on school days.

Four years of laughing, loving, and being our Owlet. We think she’s turning out just fine.

Owlet’s Spectacular Spectacles

When I got my new glasses a couple of months ago, Owlet did a lot of sighing and trying on frames of her own, saying, “I wish I could have glasses.”

Well, this happened yesterday:

No warning, no chance to prepare her; I thought this was a consultation regarding the patch the optometrist had told me about two weeks ago during the kids’ trip to the eye doctor (Owlet’s first visit). He said he needed to see her again for a proper examination and evaluation, because small children’s eyes focus really, really well, and he needed to relax her eye muscles so he could do a proper test without the eyes trying to compensate. What he did know was that she was farsighted and her left eye was weaker, and he thought perhaps she may need to wear a patch on the good eye to force the weak eye to improve. So Owlet and I went to the optometrist yesterday morning, and they gave her the drops to relax her eyes; then we went to get ice cream while the drops took effect. Once back in the doctor’s office, he took about three minutes to peer at her eyes and flip a few dials, then boom, a glasses prescription. (Good thing I’d gotten mine a couple of months ago, so she’d seen me go through the process.) She is to wear them all the time for six weeks, then he’s going to check her eyes again. He says that often wearing a prescription like this full-time at this age can train the weak eye to work better. If it hasn’t improved as much as he’d like, she’ll wear a patch and the glasses.

I struck while the iron was hot and went next door to Lenscrafters. There were plenty of purple ones, even ones with butterflies on the temples, and she tried them all on. These were the final pair (they weren’t purple, so they weren’t initially on her radar), and they look terrific. They have little Elsa cameos on the temples, with ‘Elsa’ engraved on the arms with a little flourish. Apparently they were new in that morning, so we were lucky! We had lunch out while the lenses were made, then went back to pick them up and get them properly fitted. She got a pink plastic case for them, too, which I think she’s even more enthralled with than the glasses. I’d like to take a moment to bless Lenscrafters for their policy of 50% off both kids’ frames and lenses, and the $35 protection plan for kids’ glasses that covers everything minus a small deductible. (I’m told something like 95% of the plans purchased get used, and knowing how kids play, I don’t doubt it.)

The technician warned us not to have her wear them in the car, in case the change in vision made her a bit sick, so she put them once we were at home. But then, after she’d shown them off, she wanted to put them carefully back in their case and go off and do her regular thing without them. We helped her work through her initial resistance to wearing them at home; there has been lots of encouragement about how great she looks and how special it is that she gets lovely glasses and a case when none of her friends have them. Ceri had given us a copy of Fancy Nancy: Spectacular Spectacles when I got my glasses and Owlet was envious of them, so we sat on her bed together, both wearing our glasses, and read the book. This time, instead of identifying with Nancy, who is jealous of her best friend Bree’s new glasses, Owlet got to identify with Bree, who is happy to be able to see things without blurs and without her eyes hurting.

I took a peek through them when she took them off, and wow — that left eye is bad. We had no clue; her right eye has been working hard to take care of everything, so there was no evidence or obvious clues that she was missing details. HRH said this morning that he noticed she wasn’t hesitating as much on stairs and was moving out of the way of things more precisely than she had been doing previously, though, so what we thought was general preschooler klutziness or wandering attention may have been related to her vision. We’ll no doubt notice various other improvements in the next few weeks.

If we can get her used to them this weekend — and so far, so good — then going to daycare with them will be easier. She wearing them cheerfully when I got up this morning, which is a great start, and she was excited to go visit her oldest godsisters today to show them off. (Our eldest goddaughter has been wearing glasses since she was a toddler, so I am sure she will have encouraging words for Owlet, too.)

I was fine with her turning four this week, but turning four and suddenly looking so much older while wearing her first pair of glasses? This, I wasn’t prepared for.

Owlet: 47 Months!

More backlog! This should have been published on 4 July.

We have some excellent sharing happening, and the kids are playing well together more and more. Owlet seems to really enjoy offering people turns with her favourite things, or bites of a treat. On the other side of the coin, she is getting very defensive about perceived aggression, going so far as to shriek at someone to stay away from her if they turn in her direction on the other side of the backyard. I think this is a combination of running on old information (the people she’s hypersensitive about at preschool are the ones who had trouble reining in their excitement and understanding personal space this past winter) and a new understanding that an action arises out of intent and often can be signalled ahead of time. She will also attribute bumps or scrapes to people who hit her, when they weren’t even around at the time of the incident, when an educator tells us that she tripped or fell against a table or something. Again, old information, and that sneaky interweaving of truth and imagined events.

Her play is slowly becoming more self-directed, thank goodness. If I’m there, she wants to play right on top of me, but if HRH is the one there (or if I am Unavailable, as I am when I go upstairs to work), she’s pretty good at going into her room to play with her dollhouse or her ponies on her own. All we hear is an ongoing ripple of low-level conversation between her toys as she narrates whatever’s happening, and it’s great.

She has been doing some lovely taking-care-of-people things, too. I was sick this past month, and horrible stomach cramps were part of it. Owlet tucked me in on the couch(terfield) and asked if I wanted her to gently rub my tummy so I would feel better. I was charmed by how sweet and solicitous she was being, so I said yes. She gently moved her hand in light circles on it, then said, “There, I’m feeling you better.” And when Sparky was ill, she brought him some of her favourite toys and books to keep him company and cheer him up. (These are usually received grumpily, but we remind him to appreciate the gestures for the spirit in which they were made.)

In other ways, she is very much a child of her age. There’s a lot of ignoring us going on if she’s asked to do something she doesn’t want to do, or saying an automatic “Okay” when we insist on confirmation, and then doing what she wants to do anyway. This leads to repeated orders with the parent’s frustration increasing, until the foot comes down and there are Consequences enacted. Then there are tears and the “You hurt my feelings!” accusation, for which we are told to apologize. I wonder how much of the ignoring stems from the automatic “okay” said without really processing what was asked, and how much of it is unconsciously pushing to see how much she can get away with. Sometimes HRH asks her to look at him, make eye contact, and then repeat what he said; that occasionally has a better success rate. I’m going to try to remember to do that more often.

Her language has leveled up as well. One morning I was in another room while the kids were playing in the play kitchen. I overheard this:

Owlet: “Let’s eat the recipe.”
Sparky: “We don’t eat recipes, we eat the food made from recipes.
Owlet: “But… we make recipes, so… we eat recipes.”

My kids, debating the fine points of language at eight in the morning.

Her current favourite films are Mulan and The Legend of the Neverbeast. Those, plus The Song of the Sea, are on frequent rotation. Her very favourite book right now we only got on July 1, and it is Kate Beaton’s utterly fantastic The Princess and the Pony, co-starring her fabulous Fat Pony from her history comics at Hark! A Vagrant.

When Owlet goes to the ice cream parlour, her favourite flavour is “Pink!”

Fine motor control has leveled up; for example, she’s becoming remarkably proficient with a knife at mealtimes. She’s got that fork in a death grip, but she actually managed to cut up her pancakes!

Her art is becoming more focused and precise as well, although she does still like to make huge gestures with a lot of colour, too. Wonder where she gets that from?

Owlet: 46 Months!

Slowly chipping away at the backlog… this post dates back to 4 June.

I’ve realized that I need to start documenting Owlet’s art more. She brings things home from preschool that go up on her door for a while and then get taken down as she brings new art home, and it’s usually ratty or torn by that point, so into the recycling it goes.

It’s spring, so they did a lot of bug and bird art at school this past month. This is a caterpillar made of a bamboo skewer and pompoms! There is a paper leaf on the front end for it to nibble. They made a kind of mobile with twigs and branches they found on one of their walks, criss-crossed and tied together then hung from the ceiling; all the caterpillars were tucked into the assembly for parents to admire. When she brought it home, we put it in the enormous hibiscus plant that lives on top of her dresser.

They did an insect collage with some precut elements, but added their own grass, and additional bugs. The educators say it’s fun to watch how creative the kids can get with the non-precut stuff to make grass or flowers or other bugs. As a parent, it’s fun to look at how much the finished art varies from kid to kid.

And they built birdhouse pictures!

At home, her stories are becoming more elaborate, and weave together things that actually happened with imagined stuff (“and then” is rapidly becoming a phrase that makes me tense up, and is the latest in a series of things I’d like to apologize about to my mother, for having to cope with me doing the exact same thing when I was a child). Her educators have noticed this as well, and they’re having the same challenge we are, sifting through what she says to figure out what is real and what is added in. (For example, while it is impossible that we have a pet badger at home but it ran away and got lost, it is possible that we had a stuffed badger that was misplaced. Or, in this particular case, we don’t have a badger at all, real, stuffed, or lost.)

She sings a lot. Sometimes it’s actual songs; sometimes she just tells a story in a long song that she makes up. There is a lot of love for Muppet Treasure Island songs in particular happening these days. Her favourite book is currently Fancy Nancy and the Spectacular Spectacles, courtesy of Ceri, because Owlet desperately wanted glasses when I got my new pair. And her favourite movie is Song of the Sea, a film which I firmly believe ought to have won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. (I liked Big Hero Six a lot, and it was very shiny, but Song of the Sea is a better film on many wonderful levels.)

The best new word she has come up with is ‘couchterfield,’ and I love it and want her to use it forever.

Finally, we have reached a point where she says she is big enough to not require the toddler seat on the toilet. Huzzah! Now if only she could understand that she does not need a length of toilet paper a metre long, we’d really be getting somewhere.

Her hair is long and spirals into absolutely killing ringlets. It also tangles easily, and like most kids she doesn’t like having her hair brushed. We try to stay on top of it by misting it in the morning and combing it out wit a bit of conditioner, then braiding it at night. We’ve been experimenting with updos to keep it out of her face, and those are fun, too. Or they are when we can get her past “Braid my hair like Elsa’s!”

Owlet: 45 Months!

(Thanks to juggling lots of crazy deadlines, I am two months behind on these. Here’s the one that should have appeared on 4 May.)

We bought a new batch of chalk, and she has been spending many happy hours on the side porch, colouring and getting chalk dust everywhere. We were quite impressed with this monster:

Her current favourite book is The Day the Crayons Quit, and she is currently very into ‘writing’ in any form. She was doing a lot of ‘writing a message’ in the bare gardens with a stick. (A message to whom? Worms? Birds? Ants? We will never know.)

She went through a brief punching phase, which was very odd; I think she picked it up in self-defense from the three little boys at school who went through a very intense superhero/monster-fighting phase. We’re trying to finesse her need to defend herself and express frustration; it’s okay to stand up for yourself by removing yourself from the situation and/or using words, not so okay to suddenly throw your fist out in front of you.

Spring cleaning yielded the lightsabers and the wooden swords and shields on the side porch shelving, much to the delight of the kids. Owlet is a bit more aggressive, faster than she used to be, and slashes harder than she used to, so after a few yelps and complaints from Sparky, I surprised them with a pair of sturdy foam swords from the dollar store. They were thrilled, tore around the yard together, and created a very simple but enthusiastic game they call “Three, Two, One, Fight!”


This month marked a measurable interest in Lego, and once we had explained to Sparky that he couldn’t complain about her sorting through a stack of bricks he’d dumped on the floor while they were watching a movie, he was grudgingly okay with her building. His sensibilities are frequently offended by the directions her creativity goes in, however. There’s a lot of “That’s not right!” and “That is NOT a car.”

Her first real Lego creation was made of the back half a racing car, the front half of a jet nosecone, some bricks building up the back, and a weird guy inside. She was very proud of it. She sat on the stairs and worked to get it to stick together for ages, because the front and the back kept coming apart. I finally had to help. She was very proud of it.

Sparky’s working on not putting down her design choices:

OWLET: I made this! (Shows minifig to Sparky.)
SPARKY: This… has a red ninja’s legs, a female torso wearing a sleeveless top, and a head with no hair.
OWLET: Yes! And I made it for you!

It’s a challenge… and a work in progress.

Owlet: 44 Months!

These updates are getting challenging. I remember Sparky’s growing much harder to write around this point, as well. There aren’t as dramatic leaps forward as there were earlier; it’s like everything is just a bit more developed or precise than it was last month.

We spent Easter weekend in southern Ontario with my parents, and visited the RBG while we were there. They were hosting an exhibition on frogs, and the kids were enthralled.

We walked through the permanent collections after seeing the frogs. The greenhouse room between the main building and the collection building was full of spring flowers. Walking in, the scent quite literally hit you like a physical blow. It was warm, spring-damp, and gloriously colourful. I wanted to stay and just drink in the smells. Owlet wanted to pet all the flowers, and was sad to leave that room.

But then we took her to the wee indoor koi pond, so it was all right again.

After our stroll through the collection, we saw that there were people with kids gathering for a presentation, so we sat down with them and were treated to an interesting talk on local flora and fauna. Talking about the frogs led into the host showing two snakes and talking about respecting the participants in the local ecosystem. After he was done, he invited the kids to make a line to come up and touch the snake, with the idea that if they actually experienced one firsthand, they wouldn’t have misconceptions about them and hopefully perpetuate that respect beyond the RBG doors. Sparky and Owlet were right there in line, and Sparky was fantastic, helping Owlet hold her fingers out and stroke the snake. It was pretty special.

Owlet has given up her naps at home. We don’t even try on weekends any more; we just set her up with craft stuff and she works quietly for an hour or so. She’s down to forty-five minutes at preschool, too, and only because her educators run them ragged!

I bought her a new pair of size 10 canvas shoes to use as indoor shoes at school this spring, but she’s taken to wearing them at home. She calls them her coronation shoes, and it took us a while to figure out that she meant carnation shoes, because they have flowers on them. She also has new rain boots, which have ladybugs on them. They clash with her spring coat, but we don’t care. She’s really lengthened out; a couple of her dresses are definitely tunics now. We’re into size 5 in most brands now.

Her current favourite books are the Henry and Mudge series and Madeline books. She doesn’t have a favourite movie at the moment; she’s happy to watch anything and everything. She does tend to suggest Miyazaki films first, but we have a house rule that if the sibling absolutely does not want to watch whatever has been suggested, they can say no and have to propose something in return that the sibling agrees on. Negotiations can drag on until they both agree.

There’s been a recent language upgrade; everything is more precise and stories are more involved and complex. Her artwork is refining, too; she’s still very into coating an entire page with colour, but now she draws things with circles and dots and says they’re actual things, not just abstract shapes. We started a pen pal exchange with the other July 2011 kids from my online mums group, and she had loads of fun chopping up bits of card stock and gluing them onto a butterfly shape.

And she dictated her penpal letter to me, then signed her name. Now, I talked her through how to make the letters, but this is the first time she’s ever shown interest in actually printing out her name. She did an amazing job!

She and Sparky are really good at playing together. She’s starting to stand up to him and codirect the play, and he’s starting to allow her instead of ploughing right over her like he was doing a few months ago. A couple of weeks ago they were working on a Secret Project downstairs, and when they brought it up to show us they were so proud of it. It’s a family portrait in Lego, and we really love it.

(Sparky and I have owls, HRH is holding a drill, and Owlet has flowers.) I’m so happy that they worked on it together, making artistic decisions and allowing one another those decisions. The Owlet minifig has black hair, for example; that Sparky didn’t insist on blonde hair is quite impressive, because he’s a perfectionist. Owlet’s capriciousness is teaching him to let go a bit.