Vivi at 2 yrs

Our little two year old... delightful and frustrating!  Her language has taken off; 4-word sentences are common, eg. 'Mommy come with me', 'pee potty get candy' (see below!). We pretty much communicate well, but she definitely has a mind of her own and sometimes gets too upset to tell us what's the matter.

She loves biking and always wants to play outside

And she's a great helper, always wanting to do what we're doing.

She loves Annie the Giraffe. We originally named her Erin but when Vivian started talking, she called her 'Annie' (like Mae's 'Annie the Lion'). Now that she *could* say Erin, she has insisted it stay Annie. So now we have Annie the Lion and Annie the Giraffe.

And did you notice the new potty?  Vivian showed early interest and aptitude so I broke my promise to never do early potty training again. She's pretty good at it, actually.

'Blow my nose' is also a favorite phrase. And, so far, she is good at that, too.

Thanks to the Montessori curriculum that Adi and Mae attended pre-school under, Vivian gets to move beans around a lot.  She actually requests it as an activity.

The thing she wants to do most in the world? 'Ride Hot air balloons.' She asks frequently to watch  the slideshow on my phone of about 20 pictures we took at the Erie festival last spring.

She is still a great sleeper, often telling us 'tired. nap now.' And

nighty-night games are a popular wake-time activity, especially with her big sisters.

Another favorite game:

 "Going to work. Kiss. [gives kiss] Hug. [gives hug]. Bye bye"
then after wandering off for a few minutes: "Came back."

For her birthday, she requested a chocolate cake, mac and cheese and green beans. I decorated the cake to look like Elmo since she was fond of her halloween costume.

Her favorite foods are: soy sauce, salad dressing, honey, syrup, whipped cream, butter, oranges, raisins, fizzy water, soy milk. She will try a lot of things but after a few bites informs us that she's "done eating" and tries to leave the table.

We did a Music Together class and she *loved* it; you wouldn't know this from watching her cling to my lap in the class but at home she runs around singing the songs and requests "cd music" a lot.

Mae at 6 years

 

Balloon festival

Mae has developed into an active, intelligent, interested, helpful and social six-year-old. She almost never turns down a chance to spend time with people or get out and do something-- whether ride along on an errand or help wash windows.   She loves to interact and sometimes I have to tell her I just need five minutes of quiet, or that I can't answer questions while driving, but she has a hard time waiting.  Her least favorite thing is to have to go do something by herself, like get dressed in her room, so she's always trying to find a way to get us to come with her or stay with us (like bringing her clothes to change in the living room).

Although she is still a squirmy kid, Mae's ability to sit quietly and work on a project has expanded. She's interested in crafts, especially the visual arts. It amazes me how she will draw or paint something and then continue to modify it-- perhaps cutting it out, pasting it on a popsicle stick and tying that to a string to make a wall hanging. Most of the art she makes are intended as presents because giving people things seem to be one of her favorite things to do.

One thing that has surprised me is that Mae didn't join a clique at preschool and seems to be playing with a variety of kids in kindergarten. As much as she likes other people, she seems happy to play with all sorts of kids and appears to be generous with her time to those who want to play with her.  Although she will say that some of the girls are her BFFs (without understanding why there can't be multiple 'best friends forever'), she often spends outdoor time playing in the sandbox with the boys (I'm not sure why other girls don't play in there!).  She is still strongly drawn to other kids, especially older ones; when we are on a walk and she sees kids, she wants to go play with them.  But now she is a bit shyer and has trouble figuring out how to get in on the play, often asking me to say something to the kids.  I've also seen her have challenges getting a group of kids to do what she wants to do so the leadership skills may need some development.

Given how empathetic Mae is toward other people, it has been interesting to watch her learn how to relate to Vivian as she's become more of a person. She didn't have an instinct for playing with a baby, usually being too wild for Vivian's comfort. But Mae has been working hard at figuring out how to relate, and their advancing maturity has helped-- Vivian asks for Mae now and will hold her hand or even let her change her diaper. There are still times every day when I have to remind Mae to listen to what Vivian is saying (rather, screeching) because often she is caught up in what she wants to do and ignoring her little sister's reaction, but there has definitely been improvement!

About a year ago, playing a physical game with Vivi

'Annie the lion' is still around but her importance has declined to the point where she spends most nights forgotten on the living room floor. I remember being surprised that Annie was still so loved at age 3 and then age 5 and now find it kind of sad that she seems to be forgotten so much of the time.

Mae's sleeping is quite good, now. I'm not sure how much I've recorded over the years but, other than sleeping through the night spontaneously at 3 months, Mae's sleep (or lack thereof) has caused us a lot of trouble.  She still expresses a desire for us to sleep in the room together ('we could get one big bed that fills the whole room') and tells me that she doesn't want to sleep downstairs, but most of the time she stays in her bed at night and waits until the nightlight-on-a-timer comes on a 6:30 even though she is usually awake earlier.  Perhaps we are in a sweet spot because she is tired enough to fall asleep quickly at bedtime, which was always her worst time.   On days when she's home, she'll  usually play instead of nap during rest time.

Her reading and writing advanced slowly in preschool but are now taking off in kindergarten. She is showing more of an interest in chapter books if they're about Barbie or fairies but hasn't challenged herself to really read other than the books from school. She writes quite a bit, though; usually her gifts include cards with long messages,  now even with spaces in between the words. (See the notes on the drawing: water and fish). I think that she is going to really enjoy reading and riding in the car is going to become more challenging as she can read what activities or treats are advertised around us...

...because one of her strengths is negotiating.  She has talked me into taking all of the kids to an outdoor street faire when I was really tired ('We won't ask to buy anything. And there's Indian food!') and I often have to check if I'm getting too swayed by her arguments.  It's a difficult line, we find-- we want her to develop these skills but it gets exhausting to have her pushing for something all the time. Now that she's getting an allowance, we can push some of the buying choices back on her. And she's proven to be quite a shark at getting money-- pulling weeds or picking out pebbles for cash from us, or selling fresh-squeezed lemonade after our friends in California picked a box of lemons for us. Her original idea was $5 per cup!  I was trying to convince her to save money for a 'real' princess dress from Disneyland (last month ) but she decided that wasn't worth the high cost and she's ready to go buy make-up and clip-on-earrings from Claire's boutique again.

Physically she's still quite talented; she adopted her older cousins bike when he left it here, effortlessly moving up to the next size pedal and hand brakes. In soccer, her aggresiveness makes up for her inexperience at ball-handling and it seems that much of her physical skill comes from this confidence to just try things.

Halloween race

But by far her most natural talent seems to be for math. And not necessarily what she's learned in school; she just seems to have an innate feel for numbers, quantities and spatial relations. The most obvious sign has been with the (digital) clock. An example: one day when we were driving, I told her we'd be home by 5. Seeing that the clock said 4:38, she said, "So about 20 minutes?"  This seems to us like a level of understanding and approximating that was beyond her real skills.  She also seems to get the basic idea of fractions and division-- when she was years younger, she told me that each of the four people present would get half of the two cookies we had.  And there's the time as a two year old, in a bathroom at my parents' house, that she not only knew which direction the living room was but pointed out to me there was a closet in between. Her preschool teachers never mentioned anything so perhaps we're reading too much into it but she just seems to understand these things without any effort. 

Sad face

Happy face

Her favorite chore, washing windows

Happy 6th birthday, Adi and Mae!

Adi with her birthday backpack

Mae with her birthday backpack

They each invited a friend to get pedicures at Angel Salon in Erie.

Adi

Mae

Presents at the ice cream shop

Adi wearing her Merida dress, (Disney, Brave) a present from Grandma and Grandpa Bundy.

Mae wearing her Snow White dress (Disney version), a present from Grandma and Grandpa Bundy

Dave learned how to make frosting roses for the occasion

Kindergarten!

Mae

Adi

Vivi: "me, me!"

Dad helps with the bike rack

Mae at the door

Adi in line

Road trip Conclusion

It may not have been obvious from my previous posts just how challenging this trip was. Vivian was not happy to be in the car and, although she would fall asleep alright, rarely slept for more than an hour. She was in the middle row of the van and it was necessary for one of us to sit next to her most of the time, actively engaging her. Even when we resorted to movies on the phones or laptop, she wasn't happy. Basically she is of a miserable age to travel with, although she did more than double her vocabulary and we think it was probably due to the 40 some hours of direct engagement.

Adi and Mae, by contrast, were great. And even more do when you figure how little attention they were getting from their toddler-focused parents.

I took these pics over the course of the trip for us to remember the sweet aspects .

Early mornings: we took turns spiriting Vivian out of the room when she woke in order to let the big girls sleep in. Although there was a nice coffee shop in San Rafael, my favorite early morning destination was the beach at Dana Point.

Once the girls were asleep, we could turn on the lights, watch tv , take flash photos...

The only thing she wanted to watch were pictures of the Erie hot air balloon fest or too-slowly streaming teletubbies.

McDonald's play land + ice cream in 107 deg Las Vegas 

$2.99 gas station princess sets for everyone 

Home, finally. Celebrating our survival with a midnight beer.

Road trip IV. Orange County

Hello, ocean!

Hello, cousins!

Hugs for baby Sofia. Hugs for cousin Abbie.  (Vivian learned how to give hugs on this trip).

Family dinner with my Uncle Dick and Aunt Marti.

Beach time:

Abbie and Sofia with Adi

Clarissa 

Sofia

Mae and Adi

 Dave, Pablo and his daughter Samantha 

Cold wind

Dave and Vivi

...watching me surf!

It felt a lot more graceful than I look! But I finally stood up, 18 yrs after my first attempts. 

Goodbye, ocean. Goodbye cousins and friends! Off on the long journey home...