We love our local library, we spend lots of time there and check out oodles of books each week. This fall they started a program called ‘reading to a dog’ and we have joined them three times now for it. This week it was very popular and only one dog came so all three shared the ten minute time slot and were very patient with the dog. The first time only Celia went, and she liked it pretty well. The second time there were two dogs, and not many kids so both Josie and Ewan elected to read to the dog. I picked a book for Ewan without any words. This week he had anticipated the dogs and picked out the stack of books he wanted to read to Rufus two days ahead of time. The day before Ewan was practicing reading them to me so he’d be ready for the dog. Rufus is a big big dog, and he likes to lay his paw on you while you read and connect. Josie found his paw rather heavy and kept trying to move it off, while he kept trying to put it back on. Josie read him several pages of a dolphin dreamer book, Ewan “read” him Go Dog Go and Maisy Drives the Bus, book he’s memorized mostly. Celia at the end took a few pages of Maisy for Rufus and fun was had by all.

And that does it! 52 weeks, a whole year of all three kids! I love having captured so many more of the everyday moments of the three of them. I think I may have to do it again, but I also think I may take a short break. I was also considering trying to get better at my iphoneography and pushing myself with that too. I’ll have to decide, but for right now I’ve got a cold and I just want to relax. I should also print off a book of this year!

My kids are always looking for an excuse to pull out the umbrellas so on our walk to Quebrada this weekend it was raining and fairly warm so we brought out all the rain gear and they humored me with some photos, and I let them play in the street. Good trade off? They call it ‘fishing’ when they stick sticks into the puddles and see what kind of muck they can pull up.

This week Code.org has been very popular around this house with both Josie and Celia learning working on block coding. Pretty much any time they get to use the computer or iPad is very exciting for them as we tend to favor them doing things in real life and playing with real blocks. Today though I made palak paneer for the first time, so it was handy for them to be busy with coding. Ewan mostly spent his time ‘washing dishes’ while I was cooking. Here Josie is working on the star wars module and Ewan keeps pointing out every time there is a picture of Leia on the screen.

She’s still five! I swear! I’m really late on these posts, but still better late than never.

Celia turned 5 in October. So she’s almost 5 and a quarter, but I’ve still got a few more days before that’s totally true. Celia continues to be an incredibly vivacious little girl. She is always full of energy and constantly doing cartwheels, handstands and pushing up on her hands on top of things. Our upstairs which is currently housing a trampoline and a gymnastics mat with a lot of open space seems to really suit her. Celia has been progressing nicely in her gymnastics classes every week. She’s getting further up the rope, her cartwheels are mostly in a straight line and she can hold a very excellent handstand frequently. Right now Celia is working to get her back hip pullover on the bar and climb her way to the top of the rope. She’s also started on futsal (indoor soccer) after finishing up her outdoor soccer season this fall. She’ll pick up any sports equipment we’ve got around here and work on mastering it.

Academically Celia favors her math work than reading, although she’s fairly excited about all of it which is such a help. She’ll do a few pages of math, reading, and handwriting each day and then work on the group projects and learning that we all do together. She’s using 1st grade math right now and learning digraphs. She got fed up with the reading lessons for a while and we switched over to trying Bob Books to help her see how much she’s already accomplished since she can read the entire book from some of their sets. But she has not discovered the joy of reading. Sometimes she will read signs and posters but she’s not too excited about it yet. She loves to be read to, and we do that frequently. I’m looking forward to starting the Ramona series with her, since she may find she has a lot in common with Ramona. With math she’s just beginning to manipulate the numbers from 10 to 20 having mastered adding and subtracting in the sets below 10. She also loves to throw herself into art projects, including painting and perler beads. She also wants to start on piano now that my parents just loaned us their keyboard. Recently she started the code.org lessons on coding with great pride.

Around the house she helps me with the dishwasher (under duress) but she loves to help cook including peeling carrots, cracking eggs and mixing and measuring. Most of her day she wants  to hang out with Josie and do what Josie is doing. She loves to play games, although still struggles with not winning them. She also enjoys building her own creations with lego. This year Celia is in the same choir as Josie has been in and so you’ll find her singing all over the house.

She’s matured a bit as she better learns to handle disappointment and things not going her way. While crying is her frequent response to most problems, when we remind her she can often pull herself back together to talk about the issue with words. She’s also started to heavily mother Ewan as I think she has figured out that she can convince him to do a lot of her ideas and play her games. It’s harder to convince Josie to do what Celia wants to do, although we work on that as well. With Celia, when it’s going great, it’s going really great, and when it’s not, she needs a nap to recharge and get back to a nice centered person again 🙂 She has also hit the tough developmental milestone of starting to understand death more, and that of course coincided with Mio’s death. While she’s always been interested in discussing death and even making jokes, it has provoked some nightmares for the poor kid lately.

• Size/weight: 5 and 6, 44.5 lbs, 45″ tall
• Favorite foods: cheese, tomatoes, pasta
• Favorite toy: dress up
• Favorite book: Brave
• Favorite activity: bouncing and flipping
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; gets up about 6:30, naps once a week on my demand
• New skill: reading bigger words
• Teeth: holding steady with all 20
• Literacy: making her way through the Bob’s books series

We’ve taken to postponing gingerbread houses until after the major busy time of the holidays and doing them more around new years. We make our gingerbread from scratch, and icing and use secret-stash-hidden Halloween candy. This year the girls were doing it almost all on their own and Ewan kept at it for a long time decorating the whole thing. We had some fun!