Last month, Celia turned three and three quarters, or three and three turtles she might have told you if you were here. She likes to play with words. They aren’t always perfectly clear, strangers have some trouble understanding her at times but that’s often a case of nerves, but she loves to say silly things. Her idea of fun is definitely to play all day long. She moves constantly and is not a fan of sitting still. She loves her bike and will always find a way to include some digging in her day if possible. Celia’s more of a ‘do it first, and see if Mommy notices’ kind of girl so I’ve got to keep my eye on what she’s up to frequently. She’ll often find new and interesting ways to take things apart or get filthy.

Celia spends most of her days playing with Josie and Ewan. This summer she took a sports class at the YMCA where she got to try out lots of different sports (football, basketball, t-ball, soccer, kickball…) and her favorite she say was t-ball. She loved her class and was super excited every week to try something new. When she’s playing with Josie she likes to play pretend, often time the game is now ‘big sister, little sister’ and Celia likes to pretend to be the big sister. A big change from a few months ago where she was always insisting on being the baby.

Celia’s favorite foods continue to be fruit and fats. She loves tomatoes and cheese and will devour avocado, yogurt, berries and pasta. She eats a lot of fruits and veggies which is always a pleasure, at times the only trouble is getting her to eat food with enough calories to keep her from getting hungry too soon!

Most nights we try to do a math problem together from a website called Bedtime Math which gives multi-level problems and Celia has taken great pride in that she can answer the first two questions now from each set. She can tell greater-than and less-than and also add and subtract small numbers. She uses her fingers and sometimes needs help to set up the problem, and sometimes doesn’t. She knows her letters and is working on her handwriting and consistently can write her own name in order without prompting, although the C can still be a bit sideways! We’ve been trying to work on her concentration and focus by playing games of memory and uno together. Her favorite activity lately to choose with me in one-on-one time is to play with legos, making up vehicles and houses.

She’s a wonderfully brave girl and it’s so much fun to see her stretch and try new things. She doesn’t need encouragement for trying new things in her quest to keep up with Josie. Soon she’ll be starting preschool which she says she’s excited about, but also will miss us. I think it will give her a great opportunity to explore her own desires and approach toward life without Josie being right there all the time. She’ll also get to make some new friends her own age so she won’t have to work so hard to keep up all the time with the 6 year olds. She also enjoys climbing up the rock wall at the YMCA, even though she’s officially too young for it.

As Celia’s turned 3.75 one great development has been her ability to look back on situations and come up with ideas on how to handle them differently. She can stop herself sometimes when she’s upset and change tracks instead of her brain just being flooded and overloaded with unstoppable emotion. So we can brainstorm together on how she might handle things different next time for a new outcome.

• Size/weight: 4T’s getting small
• Favorite foods: cheese, tomatoes, blueberries
• Favorite toy: whatever Ewan is trying to play with
• Favorite book: Chrysanthemum
• Favorite activity: digging and getting dirty
• Sleeping: bedtime ~8; gets up about 6:30
• New skill: ability to reflect on her prior behavior
• Teeth: holding steady with all 20
• Literacy: picking out some sight words in some books, we’ll start up the formal reading training in a few months

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2014 at 9:28 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.