We have pictures, so let’s do the 40 month post anyway, yes? This will be backdated to 4 December 2014 in a few days.
There was an overnight language upgrade again. There’s subtlety, updated syntax, that sort of thing. And pronunciation has become even clearer, not that we’ve had trouble understanding her for a while now. She can count to twenty without hesitation (fifteen is sneaky and sometimes get dropped; Sparky had a similar issue with fourteen and sixteen, which is interesting).
Her expression in art has leveled up, too. Her paintings are often still chaotic, but she painted a picture of flowers that were very recognisable this month. Her use of colour has really exploded, too. Rather than just making one or two marks on a page and calling it done, now she’s filling the entire paper with rich colour and lots of motion. Painting is her number one activity; if she can’t paint, she’ll colour or do something with stickers. I bought some poster paint, cleaned out the unit that housed the ColorWonder gel paints that all dried out, and mixed the poster paint to go in each little pot. She likes it much more than watercolors, which can be slow to get started, and it’s much easier to pull out her little art desk, pop open the paint jars, and let her go.
She loves just about any craft activity, though; if there are stickers and glue, she’s excited.
When she needs a pencil sharpened she says, “Can you scrape this please?” And her pencil grip has miraculously improved. I saw her approximating a correct pencil grip the other day for the first time. Apparently she’d seen her godsister coloring at my last concert, stared at her hand for a bit, then shifted her fingers around her own marker so it was like hers. It was encouraging.
(THose were taken on different days; she just really loves that shirt.)
We gave her a couple of quarters to put in her bank one day when we gave Sparky his allowance, and suddenly she was very interested in it. “Can I have a money?” she says. “My owl is hungry.” So we dig a nickel or a dime out of our change pockets, and off she goes to ‘feed’ her owl bank.
She has decided that when she is big and has her ears pierced, she would like feather earrings. Also ladybug ones, and rainbows. She must have heard about pierced ears at school for some reason; I rarely change my earrings from my small, plain hoops, and I don’t talk about them.
At the end of November they started working on a winter unit at school, and she brought home this little diorama:
There’s a bonus view of her wonky jack o’lantern jar next to it. It had an LED tea light in it that burned out pretty quickly because she insisted on having it on all night, every night.
She’s fun. They’ve started with the Christmas songs at school, so now there’s a lot of Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells happening in the car. She still gets stuck in those funny little-kid loops when singing, where they slip into a line from an earlier verse and then sing the chorus and end up slipping on the same line again. We grin and bear it, myself with more patience than Sparky. He refuses to hear that he did it, too, because he could never be so uncool.
~ Sparky’s forty-months post, for comparison
When we got to the mall on Sunday morning, it was later than we’d planned, and the lineup for Santa was already really long (and he hadn’t even arrived to start his shift yet!). I was very proud of how both kids behaved while waiting, and I promised them a trip to DavidsTea afterward as an incentive to keep positive. “I don’t want to see Santa,” said Owlet; “I just want to have tea.” Oops? (Anyone else remember that last year, when asked what she was going to tell Santa she wanted for Christmas, she said tea? I’m so proud.)
This year has flashed by. I’m not panicking about it, just feeling slightly sad. Owlet’s post for last month is still in draft form, and her next one is due tomorrow (ah ha ha, that’s not going to happen). For all the time I’m spending at the computer, not much of it has been writing in any form.