Well I missed Josie at 4.25 because life was very busy right then and I hadn’t quite caught up, but things have slowed down now for a couple of days and so I can do what I can.

Josie is one huge basket of energy, emotions, and intensity these days. She’s acutely aware of the changes coming up with going to preschool but she’s obviously not sure of exactly how it will work (neither am I of course!) and I think it’s got her a bit revved up. She’s excited to spend some time away from me and Celia, but worried she’s going to miss out on what we’re doing while she’s gone. She has particularly directed me that we’re not to have any fun or do fun things like gymnastics classes while she’s in school. Sorry kiddo, Celia deserves some gymnastics lessons like you too.

One of my favorite things to do as a mom when she’s getting restless and whiney is to try to teach her new age appropriate things. This is how she’s learned new skills like unloading the dishwasher, setting the table and folding laundry. Her current responsibilities are putting away her own clothes, unloading the dishwasher, cleaning up her toys and bagging up the weekly recycling. She’s frustrated with the dishwasher chore right now so we may have made a new deal for her to do laundry or diaper folding instead and I’ll take back the dishwasher chore.

As I blogged about a few days ago Josie has learned how to ride her bike as well! She’s still learning the pedal brakes and how to avoid other people, so we won’t be going out on the road or even the local bike path soon but she’s very excited and proud of herself. I won’t be sad to see the cooler weather come and bring some covered elbows and knees to protect her better for those occasional accidents though.

Academically, Josie’s writing more and her handwriting is getting better and stronger. She wrote our an entire invitation to her upcoming little tea party by hand, about three sentences. That’s about her limit right now physically and normally her attention span is much shorter than that, but this was of particular interest to her. We try to spend a little time together every day writing and we do a lot of reading as well while Celia is napping. Every night we also read from a chapter book, currently we’re reading “More All Of A Kind Family.” We already read the first book.

Josie’s favorite art right now is painting. She’s just finished a big phase of solid color paintings where each page is just one bright bright color. A few weeks ago she watched Ethan make a painting of a seascape and outer space so she’s been a bit more focused on painting a particular object. The last couple of paintings have featured the letter ‘R’. She’ll start with an ‘R’ and then add on more and more things.

She still enjoys helping me bake in the kitchen and talks almost constantly. Right now we’re have to work on her manner of speech and actual words to be rephrased more politely, but I have a feeling once she settles into school that will settle too. I have no doubt she’ll do well at school and have lots of fun. We’ve had three playdates so far with kids at her school so she’ll see some familiar faces and will have somewhere to start.

We’ve had a quiet last month and a half, no lessons since swimming in July. Josie did two weeks of every weekday lessons at the Arlington reservoir. She loved the lessons and was very enthusiastic for the teachers, but not for us when we asked her to do the same things. Either way it reduced her fear of the water and lets her get her face and hair a bit wet. Perhaps this winter we’ll start some more lessons again but I want to take things easy right now. We’ll start up dance again in October, a combination ballet and tap class.

She’s generally very sweet to Celia, now she likes to teach her things and explain what’s going on. She’s gotten much better about using her words and not shoving Celia out of the way. She’s also gotten to learn how frustrating it is when you say something to someone repeatedly and they just totally ignore you. One year olds are not known for their listening skills. They have regular cuddles in the morning. Josie will occasionally read to Celia, I hope they pick up more of that now that Celia will actually listen to books with more than a few words on each page. She’s very interested in learning about her world as well, wanting real details about animals and other things in her world. She loves our homeschool preschool and is very active in driving the lesson planning of topics. I think we may be done with it for now as my co-teacher is pregnant with her third child and with Josie in school we won’t have a whole lot of time to do it but we’ll still be able to get together for play-dates.

• Size/weight: size 5 and some longer 4 clothes
• Favorite foods: pasta, ice cream, bagels, breastmilk
• Favorite toy: dress up, bike, paint
• Favorite book: Lots of variety, doesn’t keep going back to the same ones, we burn up that library card
• Favorite activity: playing pretend
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; gets up between 6 and 7
• New skill: riding her bike by herself!
• Teeth: holding steady at 20
• Vocalizations: still working a bit on telling jokes and controlling her voice as her emotions run high and low

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2012 at 8:06 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.