Cobwebs around here? Yes, we’ve been busy with the move and a bum foot and other health issues. But I’m going to try to get into the swing of things again!

Celia last month turned five and a half! She is growing and learning so much each of these days. She has literally been growing and is now almost 48″ tall with shoes on, which is great for going to the amusement parks this summer when all the rides let you ride on the big kid and little kid rides if you are exactly 48 inches tall. She is very strong thanks to her weekly gymnastics classes. She spends a lot of her own time cartwheeling and doing handstands around the house, sometimes even in spaces where there is enough room for her to do it safely. She can do a beautiful handstand and has enviable core muscles. In class though, I think her teacher wishes she paid a bit more attention. Celia is frequently found fooling around with her friend Sasha in class and they get separated.

Other than gymnastics Celia has also been doing choir all year and loves to dance around and sing the songs. She had her final performance last weekend and said she ‘wasn’t nervous at all’, she calmed whatever emotions they may have been and sang beautifully. This spring she has also been on a soccer team, which I have had the pleasure of coaching. She’s a firecracker on the team and always scores a few goals at the scrimmage. Through the winter she also did futsol which is an indoor variant of soccer. Now she says she’s ready for a break from soccer which is just fine. We’ll do some swimming this summer and continue gymnastics. We’ve also done a few weeks of t-ball. Last week she was so much quicker than all the other kids that the coach had to tell her to stop getting the ball all the time. I could see from across the field that she was just half a second quicker in her reaction than all the other kids.

Academically Celia is really blossoming. She’s reading beginner books, level 1’s no problem, and level 2’s slowly. She’s very eager to be read to as well, but will also read to me frequently. Math is her preferred subject although she’s not too fond of the drills of adding and subtracting. She has trouble explaining now how she gets her answers often. I will ask her a question, she’ll go off to the corner, and come back with the right answer but isn’t sure how to explain how she got it. So we keep working on that, but she loves patterns and shape play as well. She’s halfway through 1st grade math.

Celia is definitely my most volatile child. Talking to another mom on the soccer field this weekend we may have found that age 5 plus being the middle child seems to be a tough place to be. Celia will go from very happy to extremely mad very quickly over any slight disappointment. We’re working on teaching her to use her words and explain her feelings, Ewan even re-explained that she shouldn’t kick today when they were fighting. She’s got some great aggression to use on the soccer field.

One of her happiest moments lately has been losing her first tooth! You can see it missing in the photo below.

I love seeing her gain more abilities and confidence. Unfortunately she is not fond of displaying those capabilities, such as carrying her shoes or clearing her dishes even though we all know she can manage. She likes to help feed the cats but that’s about all she’s interesting in helping with most days other than cooking. She likes to wash vegetables and cut things with knives. She can also crack and separate an egg.

While she loves to play with Josie, she’s also learning the enjoyment of playing with Ewan and being the bigger kid in the relationship. Now that Ewan can play lots more imaginative games I often find those two out playing with each other, dressing up, building forts and imagining new places.

• Size/weight: 6, 48 lbs, 46″ tall
• Favorite foods: cheese, tomatoes, pasta
• Favorite toy: dress up
• Favorite book: Ramona series
• Favorite activity: bouncing and flipping
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; gets up about 6:30, naps once a week on my demand
• New skill: reading whole books
• Teeth: Lost the first one! Down to 19
• Literacy: comfortably reading the H level books

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

Today while I was getting Celia to lay down for a much-needed (but greatly resisted) nap she said to me:

“Mommy I’m not sure I want to be a grownup. I want to make all the rules, but I don’t want to do the dishes.”

I’m glad my ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ lectures are getting through!

Today Celia had her 5th birthday and we had a small party with some of her friends! We hung out at my parents house, bounced in the bounce house, played limbo, played the ‘animal game’, and decorated star-shaped boxes for takehomes. They also played with the balloons. Simple pleasures of a five year old!

The bounce house keeps on going!

Celia under the limbo stick!

Sometimes they decided to go over the stick

Celia waiting for cake with her friends

There’s the cake!

Celia jumps for joy with the balloons!

This was her cake dress, she had to add it on before she could eat cake!

Celia is quickly coming up on her 5th birthday, although too late this year to be considered for Kindergarten. We are lucky to have her at home longer with us! This summer she’s been enjoying having lots of free time to play outside with sand, water and her bike. She’s very confident on her bike, riding it in on quiet streets and on the bike path. She also rides on her scooter always making sure she’s keeping up with big sister. Celia likes to ride on all the toys actually, and she’ll try anything new we find at the park too. She’s very coordinated and loves to run and play.

One way she’s gotten stronger is through her gymnastics lessons. She’s made the pre-team at our gym and is on the second pre-team level, which is two levels below any actual ‘team’ that does competitions. She still even comes bouncing out of gymnastics after 1.5 hours. The more Celia practices the better she gets, she’s made it most of the way up the climbing rope, but not all the way yet.

At home Celia loves to listen to us read books, play dress up, paint, draw and build things such as train tracks or lego. She spends most of her time with Josie playing jointly until they’ve had too much of each other and I need to separate them. She loves to sing and perform for us. When Josie’s not around Celia is starting to enjoy settling into a big sister role for Ewan and being the one ‘in charge’ for their games. I love to watch them interact in their own silly way that they connect.

Academically, Celia favors math and plays with numbers in her own head. She also loves to use Khan academy on the iPad and has almost finished the algebra-teaching app Dragon Box. I use those for rewards for when she’s finished her reading lessons which we started earlier this year. She’s still having trouble with a few letter sounds (y) and recognition (d vs b) but she’s reading full sentences and many four letter words, most recently we did the -st and -nt words. She likes to point out signs and words that she recognizes in the world around her. This year Celia will be at home for her schooling and we’ll incorporate her into our homeschool activities and I’ll work to get more hands-on and interactive to suit her learning style. Wish me luck.

Celia’s struggling right now with her continued middle child spot, where she’s too big to do some things, and too little for others. It all feels very unfair to her. We’re trying to help her express her opinions and desires without the whining and screaming. Some days I think we need to get her ears checked, but then I might whisper ice cream in the other end of the house and she’ll show up uninvited, so I don’t think the physical ears are the trouble.

She’s got a bright smile and an energy all her own that I wish I could bottle and borrow a bit of! She wants to touch, and push on everything. She is not fond of being told what to do and when, so we’re working on figuring out how to work together to get our lives to move smoothly. Celia’s looking forward this fall to continuing gymnastics and starting with choir and soccer. She just finished up a week of t-ball which improved her baseball understanding quite a bit.

She’s also still very fond of seeing her friend Safi from preschool, and Claire a family friend. Celia mostly looks to present herself as a 7 year old and play with Josie’s friends whenever possible. I want to encourage my little girl to stay little just a bit longer, no need to grow up too fast. Sometimes she seems much older, and then sometimes she’s on the floor like a two year old throwing a fit. She is always highly motivated by competition and keeping up with Josie to do anything and everything. Celia also enjoys helping out in the kitchen and can crack eggs quite well and is measuring and identifying all the ingredients.

• Size/weight: 5T, 45 lbs
• Favorite foods: cheese, tomatoes, pasta
• Favorite toy: dress up
• Favorite book: Mercy Watson series
• Favorite activity: digging and getting dirty
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; gets up about 6:30
• New skill: reading bigger words
• Teeth: holding steady with all 20
• Literacy: starting our consonant blends

Last weekend the girls were inspired to set up a lemonade and cookie stand. The one from last year stands out positively in their memory (at least Josie’s). This year Celia needed to earn some money to buy herself a princess dress (because Mommy doesn’t buy those). I’m sure you’ll be seeing some more photos of that coming. She had most of the money but needed another $10. Josie is always interested in making more money, although isn’t one to spend it. She bought herself a dress too, but she had enough money already, this was just icing on the cake.

This year unlike last year, we bought the lemonade (Costco organic, well reviewed for those curious) instead of making it ourselves, but Celia and I got cracking early in the morning to make the cookies from scratch. We calculated we’d need to sell more than one batch of cookies if we sold them two for 50 cents, or we could try to charge more and might not sell enough. Celia opted for selling larger quantities at a lower price point. The weather was good, so after spending several hours baking, we headed down to our primo sales spot right on the bike path, near the dog park, and the soccer players. The girls agreed in advance they’d split the profits (once they paid me back for the supplies).

Lemonade was also 50 cents a (10oz) cup. Apparently the market supports a price point of $1 per cup because probably 75% of people buying paid us that much. The lemonade sold well, although not quite as fast as last year because it wasn’t quite so hot outside. We spent about two hours and in the end they made $34. The cookies were a tougher sell as a lot of people on the bike path are rather health conscious (they are out exercising after all!). Celia did well though making sure people knew we had homemade cookies and we sold about two thirds of them.

Then in the afternoon we moved our sale to my parents driveway in Lexington for an hour. We were all set up and had more goods to sell, so they invited us there. They promised thirsty bikers stop in front of their house regularly as it is at the top of the hill. Sales were drastically slower here but we discovered a different demographic that was very susceptible to ours sales tactics: guys out biking with girls they were looking to impress. What better way to show you’re a kind and family guy by stopping at some kids lemonade stand to support them! We also had one car even pull a u-turn to support the girls. Celia lost interest really quickly into the efforts in Lexington and went to play in the pool and Josie joined her before too long but overall they made out really well, even if they did squeeze their grandparents for money for their goods. I insisted that as the prime worker I deserved some free refreshments.

In the end they spent $27 on ingredients and made a profit of $34.25. Celia learned a lot about sales tactics and both practiced their customer service (like not putting your finger on the inside of the cup or spilling the drink on your customer). I remember why I only agree to do this once a year. Maybe next year we should sell pretzels instead, salty not sweet.

Last month, Celia turned 4.5 years old and we celebrated with half of a birthday cake. Cake is on the mind a lot at our house, see Ewan’s 1.75 year post for information about that, but I haven’t written it yet, hopefully tomorrow. Celia is like a person who has eaten a lot of cake. She is an eternal bundle of energy and happiness, except for when she crashes and then crashes hard and is very tired and grumpy like someone coming off a sugar high. She absolutely adores riding her bike and wants to ride it every day, even tolerating us requiring her to just ride it around the driveway and nowhere else for those times when we can’t go anywhere. She transitioned in under a week from her balance bike to the real bike. The frustration was tough, but she kept at it and figured out stopping and starting with brakes quite quickly, although not quickly enough for her!

Her other favorite activity right now is gymnastics. She’s on the Bronze pre-team right now and has been moved up to the silver team as of this summer. Basically it’s the uber-beginner team in a very competitive gym. Today she was very proud of how she was able to do some backwards rolls without any help which she has been working on for a few months. She also likes to bounce on the tumble track a lot and has started to get the hang of climbing the rope. Celia has mastered the monkey bars at the playgrounds too! She finished up her ballet lessons a few months ago and she’s been disappointed not to have those anymore as well, although I think it may be more of an issue of jealousy rather than true love for the class, because Josie’s class runs longer than hers did.

At school Celia has been enjoying herself. She says she primarily plays with her friend Safi, but her teachers say she plays with everyone. She’s like me in that when she gets home from a big event like school, she likes some quiet time to unwind and decompress before talking about it. That combined with her teachers not writing about what they did most days, I’m rather in the dark about what she does at school most days. Tonight she told me the parts of an insects anatomy, so there’s something they covered apparently! She’s one smart cookie for sure. We’re working on her reading and she’s picking things up quickly. She will also read to Ewan books she’s memorized, or can figure out the words from the pictures. I’m bragging, but this is my blog, so yes I’m bragging. Celia’s also been playing around with her math skills and adding and subtracting. She begs to use Khan Academy on the ipad to practice her math skills. She only has to wait because she can’t read the words to understand most of the questions if they’re not just straight equations. I also work with her on some workbooks and she still loves to play games.

Her happiness moments are listening to us read books to her, and playing outside in the park as a family. We’re looking at trying new activities, but Celia often feels shy of trying new things if Josie isn’t doing them as well. She wants to wait until the fall to try soccer too. Her listening skills need some work too, but I think we’ve made a bit of progress at least on that. She helps around the house when required, folding laundry, emptying the dishwasher and dusting. Celia is particularly fun to talk to and hang out with when she’s on her own as the green eyed monster is very strong at this point with her. She’s also afraid of bears, and sleeps with her head under the covers every night to hide from them. Jordi sleeps with his head under the covers too, but I’m pretty sure it’s for a different reason. No problem seeing the bears at the zoo oddly enough.

• Size/weight: 5T, 42 lbs
• Favorite foods: cheese, tomatoes, pasta
• Favorite toy: dress up
• Favorite book: Olivia the big series, Nina Nina Ballerina series
• Favorite activity: digging and getting dirty
• Sleeping: bedtime ~7:45; gets up about 6:30
• New skill: monkey bars and two wheel bike riding!
• Teeth: holding steady with all 20
• Literacy: three letter words!

Hey I got older this past year too! Here’s a few photos from my birthday at the end of last year. I got a new flash for my camera so I can take better photos inside in the evening and the dark. I still don’t get too much practice but it’s getting better!

Well this week was tough finding them in good spirits playing together, more often carping on one another. So I got to dinner today and went ‘ack I don’t have a photo for my project!’ so they mostly decided they were going to pose for me. I threw Rody out in the rug and said ‘everybody sit on him!’ and got my picture. I’ll work on getting better next week, but we’re mostly getting rained on these days and I haven’t taken my camera anywhere fun. Also Jordi is now sick, hopefully he’ll feel better soon.

Celia just finished up her season of ballet for the year. For some reason she only gets two semesters of class while Josie’s goes on for quite some time more leading up to the recital in May. I wish Celia got some more lessons, but I do think it wise not to rope 4 year olds into recitals. For her last class we got to observe and I brought my camera. Celia was rightly very proud of herself for all that she had learned. She moved slowly and carefully trying to pay attention to all the small details. Our own little tiny dancer!