My kids are always looking for an excuse to pull out the umbrellas so on our walk to Quebrada this weekend it was raining and fairly warm so we brought out all the rain gear and they humored me with some photos, and I let them play in the street. Good trade off? They call it ‘fishing’ when they stick sticks into the puddles and see what kind of muck they can pull up.
This week Code.org has been very popular around this house with both Josie and Celia learning working on block coding. Pretty much any time they get to use the computer or iPad is very exciting for them as we tend to favor them doing things in real life and playing with real blocks. Today though I made palak paneer for the first time, so it was handy for them to be busy with coding. Ewan mostly spent his time ‘washing dishes’ while I was cooking. Here Josie is working on the star wars module and Ewan keeps pointing out every time there is a picture of Leia on the screen.
She’s still five! I swear! I’m really late on these posts, but still better late than never.
Celia turned 5 in October. So she’s almost 5 and a quarter, but I’ve still got a few more days before that’s totally true. Celia continues to be an incredibly vivacious little girl. She is always full of energy and constantly doing cartwheels, handstands and pushing up on her hands on top of things. Our upstairs which is currently housing a trampoline and a gymnastics mat with a lot of open space seems to really suit her. Celia has been progressing nicely in her gymnastics classes every week. She’s getting further up the rope, her cartwheels are mostly in a straight line and she can hold a very excellent handstand frequently. Right now Celia is working to get her back hip pullover on the bar and climb her way to the top of the rope. She’s also started on futsal (indoor soccer) after finishing up her outdoor soccer season this fall. She’ll pick up any sports equipment we’ve got around here and work on mastering it.
Academically Celia favors her math work than reading, although she’s fairly excited about all of it which is such a help. She’ll do a few pages of math, reading, and handwriting each day and then work on the group projects and learning that we all do together. She’s using 1st grade math right now and learning digraphs. She got fed up with the reading lessons for a while and we switched over to trying Bob Books to help her see how much she’s already accomplished since she can read the entire book from some of their sets. But she has not discovered the joy of reading. Sometimes she will read signs and posters but she’s not too excited about it yet. She loves to be read to, and we do that frequently. I’m looking forward to starting the Ramona series with her, since she may find she has a lot in common with Ramona. With math she’s just beginning to manipulate the numbers from 10 to 20 having mastered adding and subtracting in the sets below 10. She also loves to throw herself into art projects, including painting and perler beads. She also wants to start on piano now that my parents just loaned us their keyboard. Recently she started the code.org lessons on coding with great pride.
Around the house she helps me with the dishwasher (under duress) but she loves to help cook including peeling carrots, cracking eggs and mixing and measuring. Most of her day she wants to hang out with Josie and do what Josie is doing. She loves to play games, although still struggles with not winning them. She also enjoys building her own creations with lego. This year Celia is in the same choir as Josie has been in and so you’ll find her singing all over the house.
She’s matured a bit as she better learns to handle disappointment and things not going her way. While crying is her frequent response to most problems, when we remind her she can often pull herself back together to talk about the issue with words. She’s also started to heavily mother Ewan as I think she has figured out that she can convince him to do a lot of her ideas and play her games. It’s harder to convince Josie to do what Celia wants to do, although we work on that as well. With Celia, when it’s going great, it’s going really great, and when it’s not, she needs a nap to recharge and get back to a nice centered person again 🙂 She has also hit the tough developmental milestone of starting to understand death more, and that of course coincided with Mio’s death. While she’s always been interested in discussing death and even making jokes, it has provoked some nightmares for the poor kid lately.
We’ve taken to postponing gingerbread houses until after the major busy time of the holidays and doing them more around new years. We make our gingerbread from scratch, and icing and use secret-stash-hidden Halloween candy. This year the girls were doing it almost all on their own and Ewan kept at it for a long time decorating the whole thing. We had some fun!
One of my favorite scenes always is Josie reading to the other two and letting me get some things done without so many interruptions. Although you can see that Ewan isn’t so super excited about the choice of book. Josie picked this book out to give to Celia for the holidays this year and they both like it. Ewan prefers shorter books.
Even in this one small photo I can see all the things that we’ll be changing soon this next year. This couch will hopefully be retired to at least upstairs for a play couch if not entirely put out to the curb. The chicken on the wall and the curtains will be taken down as we move upstairs. The kids will all be one year bigger, maybe Ewan will decide to wear pants more often. Celia will be reading herself full books (she can do bits and pieces now and is learning more each day). Happy New Year!
I was editing pictures tonight and I really liked this one.
I tried it in black and white, and it looked sad which was not my intention.
Thank you to Celia for forcing to me brush up on my skills in gimp to merge two photos. Here we are in our new upstairs space! We are only halfway through opening presents, we had to stop for lunch and nap.
All the trees have lost their leaves and now we’ve got the strong winter sun back in our living room in the morning. Ezzy loves it, Fred too. Makes the strong pocket of light look like they discovered their very own sun though and are sitting around it.
Here’s the kids playing with one of their new toys from this holiday. They’re getting better all together, except for the times when Josie gets too bosy, Celia won’t listen to anyone elses opinions and then Ewan feels ignored and given a his two year old tolerance for disappointment he starts to play ‘donut’ and destroys everything.
I got them all in the same spot of grass, just not quite at the same time. Here they’re down in Florida at my inlaws place, more photos to come.
Wow I’m almost back at 52. I think I’ll have to start a new 52 project for next year. I really am appreciating this project, it was challenging enough to keep with it, but not so hard that I fell off the wagon, and I so love having the photos of all three of them in their natural habitat.
For my birthday this month I was graced with a smart phone for the first time. I have long held onto my dumb phone, but I was finding I had pockets of time I really could have been using a smart phone to get things done (like waiting in the car outside gymnastics while Ewan is sleeping) and maybe get more sleep at night. So while I plan to keep the big camera out, here’s the first photo of the three of them at Ewan’s last gymnastics class of the year on the bounce house.
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