The end of last month Josie turned 4 and 3/4 years old. It seems I am a very bad mother and missed age 4.5 and I’m late with even this one, ah well. Time is flying by so quickly and we’ve been fairly busy in a good way.

Josie has been doing great in school this year. She is excited to go (except for one day this year when I was taking the cats to the vets and she wanted to go to that instead) and is eagerly greeted by her friends. She loves to do projects there every day and is loudly upset when there aren’t any projects, especially two days in a row. I’ve learned to work on having some home ‘projects’ to be able to counter anything she’s missing in school. She’s generally tired after school and our usual routine of having quiet time after lunch when Celia naps and Josie and I work together has worked out very well. As Celia starts to drop her nap we’re going to have to work on figuring out how to get us all the break we need.

It’s in this early afternoon that I’ve been working with Josie on her reading during this school year. We’ve been working through a book that gives step by step lessons for us to do each day, starting with letter sounds and then putting it all together. I’m thoroughly impressed with how quickly Josie can pick up the sounds and words, but she hasn’t started showing off her talents yet outside of our work sessions. She brings me the book and whiteboard though so I know she’s excited about it, we take the weekends off too. She loves for me to read to her a lot too, right now at night we’re reading ‘Bean and Ivy’ and we’ve read a few of the ‘Clementine’ books lately too at night. During the day she’ll request fancy nancy, or some llama llama but she’s not so stuck on reading one book all the time anymore.

Josie has continued her gymnastics lessons and enjoys them every week. She’s making progress each week and we’re trying to work on one skill at home too at a time so she can really see the difference. These past few weeks have been for working on cartwheels and getting her legs really up in the air. She’s excited to show her teacher how hard she’s worked and how she’s improved this week. She finished up her ice skating lessons and she’s asking for more, but we’re not up for a multi-month weekend commitment that this entails. She’ll just have to enjoy free skate with the family. Today she went and was trying to give Celia lessons.

She’s also gained an interest in more board games. She like Sorry, and she’s even trying to play a game I got for my birthday called Forbidden Island which is made for older kids as it’s fairly complicated. She’ll take our suggestions as to how to play though, so it works out so long as Celia is asleep and not trying to make off with the pieces.

Josie is a planner, she likes to know what’s the plan for the future and she generally wants to make those plans for herself. She has lots of ideas for art projects, often mimicking what she’s done in school lately. She’s interested in cooking and will help me from time to time. She can fold laundry, diapers, empty the dishwasher, put together the recycling, but she’s generally reluctant to do any of those things without some prodding. She did have one day last week when she was so excited that the following day was her special day at school that she volunteered to help! That was pretty nice.

All in all Josie’s a lot of fun to be with. She tells coherent stories, she’s interested in learning new things. She plays with her sister all the time and includes Celia even when her friends come over to play. She is mostly kind and tolerant given that Celia is 2, if not a bit bossy. She loves to go out and do things and explore. I can’t wait for this winter to be over so we can get moving more easily and not be so cooped up in the house!

• Size/weight: 5 and 6, around 43 lbs perhaps and 42 inches? It’s been a while since we’ve checked
• Favorite foods: pasta, cheese, sweets
• Favorite toy: her sister
• Favorite book: Clementine series, complicated picture books
• Favorite activity: gymnastics
• Sleeping: bedtime ~8; gets up about 6:45
• New skill: cartwheels
• Teeth: holding at 20
• Reading/writing: We’ve been working on consonant-vowel-consonant words as well as some consonant blends that she can put together now. Her penmanship is pretty good, but she prefers to stick with uppercase letters and I have to cajole her into the lowercase ones. Keeping the d’s and b’s straight is also a challenge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 at 8:27 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.