For Josie’s 7th year around the sun, we continued to homeschool while she continued to develop her own interests throughout the year. Her favorite activities this year have been choir and gymnastics. She made it through the entire year of ballet, but was decidedly less enthusiastic about it once they started preparing for the recital and it became more repetitive. Choir has been a joy-bringing hour every week with singing and dancing and making new friends. We also did swimming and gymnastics, and as she’s gotten better at gymnastics she’s more excited about doing it. Swimming is merely a required event in our family.

This year it feels like Josie has really transitioned from being a younger child to being a full fledged kid. While she still plays with her younger siblings a lot of the time, she’s getting more frustrated with their lack of patience and communication skills. She also wants to try a lot of new things that she see’s as being for older kids such as having a bank account, gum, an allowance, and a longer leash in general with doing things. Mostly I think it’s working out well as she is a responsible kid, generally thinks things through and listens to our requests. She’s also more aware of comparing herself and those around her as to how everyone is doing. She can be pretty hard on herself at times so we’re trying to help her see that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.

At home you can often find Josie reading. She reads voraciously, often in the morning just upon waking up, and again later in the day sometimes after lunch when we all need a bit of a break from one another. Some of her favorites generally focus on fairies, animals or magic of some sort. We’ve been reading a fun series of fractured fairy tales called “Whatever After”. I have to keep a steady supply of books for her each week from the library she’s easily going through 5 to 10 chapter books a week depending on their thickness. I think she can read more challenging material than she’s currently choosing, but the challenge is in finding more rich reading that doesn’t focus on dating or scary topics or isn’t just all about school.

Josie otherwise plays a lot of pretend with dress up, the dolls and anything else she sees around for props. She’s also still very much into art projects, lately it’s been a lot of rainbows but she also loves to follow some online drawing lessons that we’ve found for drawing things like Anna, Elsa, rainbows, kittens and aliens. She’s also developed some great skills following building instructions for lego’s and other such toys. Giving her the space and time away from her siblings is the challenge. We’re really all going to enjoy having some more space soon. Josie reminds us every chance she gets that she wants her own room. We remind her that it won’t be happening any time soon.

Josie also enjoys cooking in the kitchen. She’s learned how to use a small pairing knife this year and will cut up broccoli and carrots for me and other softer vegetables and fruits sometimes. She can make her own cookies except for putting them in and out of the oven, and made some for her cousin Abby just last week.

She’s frustrated that a few of her friends have moved away lately and while they’re not totally out of our lives, they’re not nearly as convenient and frequent a fixture in them as they once were. She’s also been loosing teeth! Her first one went down the drain as she was eating and didn’t realize that it wasn’t a piece of food that was in her mouth.

Josie continues to be a big talker and will narrate and share everything going on in her head, in the car and around the dinner table. We’re working on reminding her to give other people a chance to speak as well.

She’s looking forward to starting soccer this fall, returning to choir and continuing with gymnastics. In general Josie will help out around the house when asked and will even pitch in when she sees something that needs to be done. But the cries of ‘that’s not fair’ have been rather frequent lately as she spies the world for more injustice. We’ll try to keep that spirit alive to fight for others in the world suffering true injustice. And I’ll try to cut the servings up equally and continue to give up my share to make things even out.

• Size/weight: 8, ~51″ tall
• Favorite foods: cheese, pasta, dessert
• Favorite toy: art supplies
• Favorite book: Whatever After series
• Favorite activity: playing with her friends
• Sleeping: bedtime ~8:15; gets up about 6:30
• New skill: good handstands and cartwheels
• Teeth: Lost 5 so far
• Literacy: devouring books

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2015 at 10:02 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.