.. 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.