Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, July 25-27, 2015

Okay let's hit the highlights reaaaal quick:

1.) Roller derby Saturday night. It was the kick-off event for Pride Week 2015, so we had a short chat about what Pride is beforehand.  She drew a sign with the teams on it to help her cheer, she kind of watched some roller derby, and she pored over the program that had all the women's roller derby names and the rules of the game.

2.) Storyboards for Princess and the Frog

[frogs with tongues tangled up, firefly spelling his name fancy]

[frogs, tree stump, river, alligator, trumpet]

[frog, raft, tree stump, river]

3.) Swim lessons started today. She was excited and willing to try everything and seemed to be doing pretty well. Afterwards we had a talk about what adrenaline is and how it works and how it makes you feel.

4.) She's been weirdly obsessed with burying nuts in the backyard and then digging them up again later, like a squirrel. Her first attempt ended in ants because she used shelled nuts. We couldn't find any nuts in their shells at Target today, so she kind of gave up and bought some chocolate covered almonds. (Seems logical to me.)

And as always: playing Legos, watching Curious George and Princess and the Frog, and she played some more Pokemon on Norman's computer. Oh and she drew this great Disney Fairies/Pokemon crossover where there are Pokemon-type fairies and they run an "egg care" where they watch the Pokemon eggs until they hatch. I don't know where that paper got to though.

And also she's been making a concerted effort to be helpful, and today she put away the clean dishes early this morning without anyone asking her to and she helped me cook dinner!

Thursday, July 23, 2015

So pretty much Lucy did five things today:

--built things/played with Legos

--watched Curious George and various other PBS Kids videos

--went with Norman to buy some groceries

--played a very complicated role-playing storytelling board game with Norman for THREE HOURS

--made herself a PB&J



THREE HOURS. I'm not sure if it's all the tiny pieces, or the storytelling aspect, or the fact that she was doing it with Norman, but I'm very impressed.

Tuesday and Wednesday, July 21 & 22, 2015

I got out of the shower to find this had happened:

I was so seriously impressed, because it must have taken her forever to lay all those pennies out (182 of them, as it turned out), and she stuck with it!

She wanted to know how many there were, but didn't think she could count all of them (overwhelming, of course!), so I suggested that she divide them into groups of ten pennies each, and then count how many groups of ten there were. She needed some help with this, so I gathered some toothpicks, and we used those to divide them up.

Then we counted the groups, and she used the calculator on her tablet to find out how many there were (18 x 10 + 2). Then we worked on the other coins too. (At which point, she was counting her dimes, and it turns out she can count be tens to 100! I didn't know about this.)

(And then of course she threw a fit when she had to pick all the pennies up, but let's focus on the positives, eh?)

Also she volunteered that she can spell "sí" (Spanish for yes), and did so. So I asked if she could spell the other kinds ("see" and "sea") if she closed her eyes and looked at the words in her head, and she could! This is a big deal -- she's known the first letter of most words for a long time, but spelling beyond that has not come very naturally to her so far.

We went to a one-man puppet show at the library. He played his banjo and sang and told the story with the puppets. Then at the end her showed us how all the puppets work and told us he made them all himself. Lucy loved it -- she was cracking up and interacting with the show the whole time.

She also played in the sprinkler (this always involves filling with water the giant hole that she periodically digs a little deeper).

Let's see... watching Princess and the Frog, the Christmas episode of Kid History, Curious George, some random Mickey Mouse Christmas movie...

Oh, this morning she asked to look through the tub of grown up costumes, which I hauled out of the garage for her to dig through. That resulted in some great stories about things that happened before she was born and/or aware.

And always Legos. Always.

June and July -ish, 2015

I'm so bad at making myself keep up with this. But, as my friend is fond of saying, never stop starting!

So since the last time I updated, we...

--went on a nine-day road trip to Oklahoma and back. We went to a Lego Discovery Center and a children's museum, we met extended family (and she passed out her SWAPS), we visited her grandparents' new house out in the country, we went to several malls, she got to play in a cool little indoor water park thingy. Oh and she watched a bunch of Disney Channel in the hotel rooms, which resulted in about a week solid of watching the TV show Jessie on Netflix when we got back. And during this last week she watched Princess and the Frog about 10 times after catching part of it on TV while we were gone. Oh and she spent a lot of time in the car on a US geography puzzle and fact book.

--went to the local aquarium (which we hadn't visited before). They have a cool tank where you reach in and touch rays and little sharks, which was neat.

--more visits to the local children's museum. Gosh darn it we are going to wring every dollar's worth out of the year-long membership we bought, and also it's air conditioned and it's ridiculously gross and horrible outside here in the summer.

--attended a bunch of library programs. The Friends of the Library here fund great special programs here every summer. I know I documented a bunch last summer, and they're just as wonderful this year! We saw a two-person Robin Hood play, a presentation with live birds of prey, a local TV meteorologist came and answered questions, the lady from Gullah Gullah Island came and told us story and sang songs with us, and a guy from the city brought reptiles and told us all about them!

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but we've started letting her read with a flashlight in the little tent she has in her bedroom before she goes to sleep. She's never sleepy at the time the grownups would really like to have some time to themselves, so why not? She's been big on her Lego building books, her Pokemon book, the book about plants, one about like criminal forensics (fingerprinting and stuff)... still mostly non-fiction.

And speaking of fingerprinting, I found a cheap (obviously) fingerprinting kit at the dollar store so we did that one afternoon. It wasn't spectacular, but she seemed to get a kick out of it! She was looking for "loops" and "whorls" and stuff.

And then just general every day, lots of Legos, lots of TV, lots of playing in the sprinkler, a good amount of drawing. She's also becoming more independent in the kitchen, pouring herself juice (sometimes without spilling it), finding her own snacks, making her own toast... stuff like that. It's kinda nice!

Here are photos from the aquarium, and here are photos from the road trip.

And here is the woman from the birds of prey center with an owl:

And here is the time all of Lucy's stuffed animals were dressed up as detectives (purple unicorn = handcuffs, peace sign bear = badge, brown teddy bear = shades, minnie mouse = flashlight, moose under the blanket = deerstalker hat [which, yes, is actually a swimming bonnet]):

And here are some kids touching a tiny alligator:

And here is Lucy with the reptile stuff in her lizard shirt:

And here is the plant cycle she drew unbidden:

Oh and also yesterday she invented the lightning rod. Norman mentioned to her that lightning usually tends to strike metal things and tall things, so she was like, "So people should build tall metal things so those get hit instead of other things!"