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!
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| About a year ago, playing a physical game with Vivi |
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.
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| 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.
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| Sad face |
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| Happy face |
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| Her favorite chore, washing windows |
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