No we didn’t go with that one.

This fall we went with a new gymnastics class for a few reasons. Her old one was a lot of time spent waiting for a turn and the teacher calling the non-cooperative kids back to class. Josie loved it, but one of the reasons she loved it was because of her friend Jordan who was also in the class. Jordan was 5 and so starting this fall she went to school and couldn’t do a Tuesday morning class anymore. Josie’s teacher also told me that she’s pretty talented and should take ‘real’ gymnastics classes. So off we went to a real gymnastics studio, but no big surprise, ‘real’ gymnastics aren’t that real at age 3, but they sure do cost more money. We did one 10 week session and Josie enjoyed it, Celia tolerated having to play in the background, but we’re done with it for now. We may go back to the other class and do both the baby and the big kid class so both of them can have fun in the new year.

They did a good job of keeping the kids active by moving them in a circuit, but there wasn’t much teaching or learning going on per say, just more ‘ok walk here and jump here’. A little bit of gymnastics skills with walking on the beam or hanging from a bar, but I was surprised at the lack of instruction. Perhaps the kids are just too little, this isn’t Russia or China screening for olympians. But the class was almost 20 minutes drive away (celia hates the car still) and overlapped with Celia’s preferred nap. So bye bye  to that class, but she had fun. We got to take some pictures in the last session, but it was too dark in there to do anything great.

In the last class they had each kid run a circuit independently while the parents sat in and watched. My mom came to help with Celia, ended up sitting with her sleeping in the car the entire time. Josie ran through her circuit without stopping and flipped over at the bar instead of just hanging from it (landed on her feet just fine) and then tackled her teacher. Guess the audience made her a little nervous.

Tonight at dinner we were having chic-n nuggets (it was a bad day) at dinner and Celia started to rub the nugget in her hair and I told her ‘food goes in your mouth.’ She looks at me and then puts the nugget on top of her head. Puts her hands down, balancing the nugget and smiles and says to me ‘HAT!’

I tried really hard not to laugh.

Well ok now Josie is 3 and 7 months old… as I’m behind in the blog. As we head into December expect to see me enjoying reminiscing about last summer.

Josie is a full on talking-walking-bike riding person these days. She talks all day from morning to night and never seems to run out of something to say. She has a lot of complaints as well, we’re working on those manners. She often does say please and thank you though. She has a lot of opinions but also changes her mind frequently. I never can tell what she’ll eat some of these days, something was great one day and suddenly it’s no good the next.

With Celia being a little more work to keep track of and keep safe as she gets into everything, Josie is getting more time independently with her friends like Ethan and Zach or Bronwyn. It’s interesting  to hear what she has to say when she comes back from talking to them as they are clearly having some more indepth conversations other than just running and playing games. For instance she’ll tell us about upcoming birthday parties and what’s planned. She also hosted Ethan without his mom for the first time as a playdate, I feel like she and her friends are old enough that I can handle them easily while also entertaining Celia.

She’s pretty trustworthy but if she gets too excited or tired she tends to loose a little control and play rough. Not unusual for her age. She’s a sensitive girl though and has entered into the rough world of childhood play where not everyone is always nice. I’ll find myself being told to ‘go away’ when I try to play with her because someone else said that to her earlier. I wish these things wouldn’t happen to her, but learning to deal with them is part of being a kid. Not everyone is nice in the world!

She’s started to try riding a regular bicycle, I’ll get the video up sometime. She’s been using the neighbors bike and just has to learn to pedal. With some practice I’m sure she could get it but I’m not eager to get her started quite yet as I’d like to wait until spring at least to get a little more common sense to be included with her good balance and strength.

For activities she’s been doing weekly ballet and gymnastics. Gymnastics has ended but ballet has been something she looks forward to each week. She’s made some nice new friends and does a good job listening to the teacher mostly. She’s developed a case of the sillies a few weeks where she’ll throw herself on the floor like she fell down, both in gymnastics and ballet.

She’s a good big sister and getting better about both telling Celia to stop hitting her with her words, and not pushing her over as much. She also has been experimenting with picking Celia up. As long as they both agree and no one gets hurt, I really try not to get involved in what they choose to play together.

Josie has started to make the foray into the world of jokes and humor too. I try to explain jokes to her and she likes them, but doesn’t always get the timing quite right when she tries to do them to you. Ask her about the interrupting cow, hers is too polite sometimes.

Josie has been getting herself dressed now for a long time. She has her own opinion on what matches, stripes and stripes match right? no matter the color. Pink plus pink plus pink match even if they’re all different shades. So long as she is weather appropriate, I just go with it. She often tries to make me pick stuff though, and then picks the opposite. So I mostly decline the offer to choose unless she goes with what I pick because I don’t need oppositional teenage behavior yet!

In the last few months she’s really gotten into art projects as well. Art was previously a short activity until recently as she’s drawing more and painting and cutting and gluing. We’ve made some great stuff together and I really enjoy getting to work on it with her. I’m not a great artist in the drawing, painting, cutting, gluing world… so I look forward to the day when she surpasses me.

As for her numbers and letters and reading, she’s identifying most letters and small numbers and can write some of them unprompted. She’ll ask a lot of questions about signs and is starting to understand that letters can be written in cursive as well.

• Size/weight: 4, 34lbs, 40.5″ or so on height
• Favorite food: breastmilk, cheese, pasta, yogurt – this is just really consistent even though she eats a variety of foods
• Favorite toy: dolls and pretend and most anything that Celia wants
• Favorite books: Fancy Nancy, LLama Llama
• Favorite activity: Acting out scenarios with herself, puzzles
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; gets up ~6:30am
• New skill: understanding humor and making some jokes
• Teeth: 20. 10 on the top and 10 on bottom. We’re done!
• Vocalizations: whining and lying are used, but mostly pleasant and informative

Seems that Celia is developing a vocabulary lately that we haven’t done a good job tracking. So here are some of her words in no particular order:

• mama
• da (as in daddy)
• cheese (long eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee)
• agua (water for the non-spanish speakers)
• ball
• stick
• leaf (we spend a lot of time outside)
• hat – she just finally got the hang of the ‘t’ on the end, it was previously ‘ha’
• dah (dog)
• this
• yah (basically my girls played a game of who can scream ‘yah’ louder with each other yesterday)

So I spent some more time this morning photographing my neighbors for their Christmas card too. Here’s Little Zach getting bigger and bigger. I didn’t make the same mistakes as last time, I’m definitely learning as I go!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. We’ve had some losses this year in the family and some scares, but we’re so happy to have the family and friends we have with us every day.

One of the crafts we made this year, in addition to the normal hand shaped turkeys, was make a Thanksgiving Tree. For this I taped a tree shape on the wall, drew some leaf shapes on paper and had Josie go to town cutting them out and we wrote what we were thankful for on them. Mostly they’re all people, family, friends, neighbors, teachers. Then Josie added in one for each of the seasons. And Cups. Not sure why, but Josie is thankful for cups, and why not. Here’s the girls this morning in front of the good old traditional Thanksgiving Tree.

My grandmother did not like the roast kale at dinner tonight. So she slowly shoved it across the table on the tablecloth until it looked like my dad was the one who didn’t eat it.

Josie just said no thanks.

This article shows I am not alone in my enjoyment of the canned cranberry sauce, still in can shape!