Humble Bragging

Let me spend a little time bragging talking about Charlotte. She is now 3 years and 4 months old, but talks about what she'll do for her fourth birthday nearly every single day. Birthday parties are her current obsession and she pretends to throw one for her friends nearly every day.

Moving her to KinderCare on her 3rd birthday has proved to be the absolute right thing to do. The first few days she was a bit uncertain when I dropped her off, but now that she knows all the teachers, she's just doing so amazingly well.

So well, in fact, that Chris and I just had our first parent-teacher conference last week. Over the summer, there wasn't much structured learning because it was their "Summer Camp" curriculum, but as soon as the older kids went back to school, so did KinderCare. KinderCare cares a lot about education and does assessments in the fall, winter, and spring. Long story short (humble brag coming), Charlotte is excelling in just about everything she's doing, except for creating charts and graphs (which, really? They do assessments on graphs? Even I can barely put together graphs on PowerPoint, and I have to do this for a living!). They have her in the 4 year olds' classroom the majority of most days, where Ms. Cheryl is just fantastic. She is just the sweetest lady and calls Charlotte "My Strawberry Shortcake," or "My Sunshine." We also signed Charlotte up for Phonics, so she also spends a few hours a week in Junior Kindergarten with five-year-olds and advanced four-year-olds.

After 4 months of  "school", Charlotte now knows the following:

• Numbers past 50
• Days of the Week
• Months of the Year
• Letters and the sounds they make
• Most of the lowercase letters
• How to (almost) write her name
• Shapes
• More things that I simply can't remember right now

She has an amazing memory. We have a 50 State floor puzzle that I picked up at a consignment sale. Each state has a different image on it, and Charlotte quickly figured out where many of them go, along with the picture associated with the state. For example, when we say to find Illinois, where her Grandma and Grandpa live, she can find it in seconds among all the other state pieces because she knows it has a cornstalk on it. It's pretty astounding.

While her previous daycare (and where Phoebe goes) was a nice, loving environment with a lot of great homemade food, there wasn't much in the way of real learning. KinderCare does learning through fun activities. Here is a picture of Charlotte's family:

Four months ago, Charlotte could barely draw anything. Today, she can draw an egg-shaped Daddy, complete with legs, feet, arms, and very long fingers. The little egg baby picture of Phoebe slays me. And I love her Charlotte gave herself toes, but no face. And as for Mommy? Well, I think she just got tired, by the time she got to me. :)

Point is, she is just doing so great at "school." She's made a bunch of new friends, she learns new songs each week, it seems, and as one of her (three) teachers said, she has a true thirst for knowledge. We're just so proud and amazed by everything she's learning. Also? She's learned so many manners. We were already pushing the please and thank you pretty hard, but now she even says them unprompted. "Mommy, thank you for making dinner." "Daddy, thank you for driving me home." Um, what?! You're welcome!

(The one drawback is that Charlotte never stops talking. It's like stream of consciousness overload as we hear just about everything that goes through her head, as it's going through her head. The other morning she came into our room telling us how there were bad guys in her bathroom, so she needed to use our bathroom. We told her to go ahead, but to be quiet and then to go back to her room (the early morning wake ups are killing us!). So she goes past us loudly whispering "tiptoe, tiptoe, tiptoe" and then proceeds to describe exactly what she's doing in the bathroom, as if we needed to hear any of that! It kind of defeats the purpose of trying to be quiet.)

Anyway, humble brag over. :) Thanks for putting up with it.

Seven Months - On Efficiency or Maybe Laziness

Phoebe turned seven months old on Monday!

She continues to be such a sweet, lovable baby. I tell you, I am just soaking in that baby because I know she won't be one for much longer.

Phoebe loves food. She's pretty much devoured everything we've put in front of her with the exception of avocado. The face she makes pretty much says it all. She is not a fan, which is surprising because it's still one of Charlotte's favorite foods (and mine, too). Phoebe is so good at eating that we pretty much don't have to give her pureed food anymore. I steamed up some carrots, cut them up into itty bitty pieces, and she just gobbled them up. She also loves holding on to a piece of baguette or other crusty bread and gnawing on it until it's nice and gooey. The hardest part in all of this is that I now need to be more creative in what I give her.

Despite Phoebe's voracious appetite for solid foods, she's now a wee little thing, at least according to the growth charts (her chunky thighs tell a different story). Chris took Phoebe to the doctor on Monday to get weighed. She's now 16 pounds 1 oz, up about 6 oz from four weeks ago. However, she's now down around the 33rd percentile. Dr. M. isn't worried, but wants her back in the clinic four weeks from now to be weighed again.

I looked back at Charlotte's weight and she also dropped off after six months. At 8 months she was in the 45th percentile after being solidly in the 80th or higher. Of course, she also started out much, much bigger and was always about a pound heavier than Phoebe.

Anyway, back to Phoebe. She is really vocal, and by vocal, I mean loud. Seriously, her happy shrieking is loud enough to make me want to claw my ears off, but when she's upset in the middle of the night and can't be soothed, I feel like my eardrums are bursting! I don't think Charlotte was ever that loud. Phoebe certainly knows how to demand our attention.

As for crawling. Phoebe can army crawl, but only when she's sufficiently motivated to go after something. If there is anything closer by that she's remotely interested, she'll go for that instead. She's mastered pivoting around to get toys, which I guess is either all about efficiency or laziness. Anyway, I'm sure Phoebe will soon figure out that crawling is much quicker. For now, I'm still pretty happy that she's more immobile than not.

Sleeping has been up and down, mostly up. She now has two teeth, although she must handle teething really well because one day the tooth wasn't there, and then next day there it was, jutting out of her gums like it's always been there. All four of us had colds last weekend, and that definitely messed up with her sleeping (see: eardrums, bursting).

To close, here are two adorable videos.

The first. Chris was tickling Phoebe, and Charlotte didn't want to be left out.

The second, Charlotte demands that Phoebe crawl. Right now!