Wednesday and Thursday, August 26 & 27, 2015

Wednesday:

Library, as usual. Norman put a hold on the Lumberjanes collection that had an issue she hadn't read in it, so she pretty much just plonked herself down in the children's section and read it. While she did that, I looked through all the juvenile graphic novels and picked some out that I thought she might like. She read two of them while we were there when she was done with Lumberjanes. Then she drew a picture. Then she made friends with a brother and sister (the sister's name was also Lucy) and they bonded over Lego books.

She made me a bracelet! Clever design, really. (A strip of newspaper and foam stickers)

Oh and she finished that fish lantern that we got in the Kiwi Crate.

And she wrote "LUCY MOM B-DAY" on her leg, reportedly because those are the words she can spell.

Thursday:

She's been all over her Girl Scout manual the last few days. She's been like doing some of the activities and reading the whole thing (again). Some stuff about money and who knows what all else.

Somehow we started talking about the Quints (some characters on Curious George) and we couldn't remember all of their names, so I looked it up, and then she pretty much just read the whole Wikipedia article of the list of Curious George characters.

Also watched some Curious George.

I found out about Amazon Underground (which deals in completely free apps with completely free in-app purchase so like heck yes sign me right up), and put a fun little cooking app on her tablet, so she played that some.

Read Lumberjanes some more, and there's something about 100 cookies and a Yeti or something? She started talking about how if she had 100 cookies she would trade them for 10 cookies because 100 is way too many. So then she was muttering something like, "...and 9 times 10 is 90, so I would give up 90 cookies!" Ummmm yes. Yes you would. o.O

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Disney Fairies movies

She figured out how to turn on the Spanish audio and subtitles on Netflix.

She made and wrapped some birthday presents for me from some of the characters from the Fairies movies. I opened them right up because she used some of her blankets that she sleeps with to wrap them. She wrote an illustrated story called Beauty and the Bees about a male fairy ("sparrowman") who gets turned into a bee and then a fairy falls in love with him, etc, etc. Apparently the title is a throwaway joke from one of the movies, but she drew it for me!

And also a field journal by the disbelieving dad of the human girl in one of the movies. Illustrated rock journal! With bonus butterflies!







(I'm really digging her spelling process. She still puts "water writing" in the middle, but more and more often she's put the first letter of the word, and sometimes even the last letter too! Progress!)

We worked on a Kiwi Crate, which means we built rubber-band-powered paddle boats and decorated sails for them, and started on a mod-podged fish lantern! (to be completed tomorrow)

Monday, August 24, 2015 (+photo dump)

Today we:

-- went grocery shopping

-- went swimming. for like an hour? it was a long time. we had fun.

Also Norman strew the instructions to one of his card games, so the first thing I heard this morning was Lucy talking about how it's just like Pokemon but different in certain ways or something. I dunno. They looked at the cards for a while before we went shopping.



Also, yesterday Lucy made dinner! Okay, she said she wanted to make dinner, and she decided what to make and I... assisted. She learned how to use a knife safely to chop up fruit, and we also made grilled cheese. She burned her wrist on the pan during the making of the first sandwich, so I finished that up. But she made the fruit salad and sliced all the cheese.

Also I got Hungry Hungry Hippos from the thrift store so we've been playing that.

Also Disney Fairies movies, which has resulted in some cardboard and tape tiny house crafting (because usually she takes everything that happens in the fairy movies and translates it to lizards).

Also Pokemon watching.

And she's still about those Lumberjanes.


Oh my goodness I thought I was done but I wasn't because I found these photos from this last week.

She has this activity book where you're supposed to fill in the cartoons with what you think the characters are saying. She figured out that it would be great if these penguins were saying some dialog from one of the Lumberjanes comics, so she copied it in!



And then... she got a new Kiwi Crate, and she made a little booklet like the Kiwi Crate instructions, but for one of the projects in her Girl Scout binder! (a panda mask!)







And THEN, one day last week I woke up to Lucy telling me that she had made Norman and me some "peanut butter toast with basil, paprika, and garlic leeks." And like... WHAT. I was like, "Well, whatever that is, it will still be there in 15 minutes when I'm actually conscious." It turns out it was this:



"Garlic leeks" = green onions (she didn't know the name of them). She chopped them up with a steak knife. This is part of why we had knife lessons yesterday. Gracious. And mine had chocolate sprinkles, because my birthday is coming up. Yes I took a (tiny) bite. Because, as I'm always telling her, you won't know if you don't like something until you try it!

And also I took these today. Looking very grown up!

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Lots of writing today... and drawing.

She made a quiz sheet for me to answer and then wrote down what her stuffed animals thought too.



She saw a post on FB about the questions I ask her every so often (to see how her answers change) and wanted me to ask them again, but I wasn't going to, so I said maybe she should ask me questions instead, so she did, and she drew the answers. (She got frustrated when she was almost done and crossed it out. But then after she calmed down she copied it all again to finish it. Progress!)



She drew a picture that has something to do with that Mickey Mouse Christmas movie.



She saw this anagram in one of the Lumberjanes comments and was obviously smitten (we are not immune to finding potty humor hilarious).



She learned about polygons "tiling the grid" from a Tumblr post I saw and showed to Norman. So then she tried to do it with hearts and circles.



She read a bunch more from the Jesus Storybook Bible.

She got out her Pop-Up House of Inventions to read, and then decided that it would of course make a great dollhouse with her Duplo people.

We went to the library and she did some art paint program on the children's computer.

She had her last swim lesson. I signed us up for membership at the place with the indoor pool, so we'll go swimming once a week for the foreseeable future.

Oh yeah and she took some photos and filmed an intro for some new show about lizards that she's planning to make.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Well, this morning she was still watching those Mickey Mouse Christmas movies, so she dressed up like Santa.

(Beard, pillow-belly, hat, sleigh, reindeer, and bag of toys included [those are pipe cleaners attached to Moose, her stuffed reindeer])

She and I had reason to be hanging around outside a place with a variety of interesting plants waiting for something, so she decided that we should gather materials for clothing and fire wood in case we had to wait their a very long time. (I sewed some leaves together!)

She randomly sat and read from the Jesus Storybook Bible for like half an hour, because she wanted to look something up that she'd seen in this Easter puzzle pad that she has and has been working on, but she ended up just reading a whole bunch instead.

She set up a system for us to send notes back and forth to each other from my craft room to the playroom. She's been writing her letters in code.

She hung around in my craft room while I was working, always eager to help me with stuff when she can.

She went with Norman to a board game shop.

She said that she wants to have two boys and two girls when she has kids, so Norman gave her a coin and had her flip it four times several times and keep track of heads and tails (Local Statistician Can't Stop, Won't Stop).

Spent awhile reading some Lumberjanes comics.

Monday, August 17, 2015

Today was the first day of school for the local public school kids. So Lucy is officially, technically in 1st grade. We celebrated this fact by... doing what we normally do.

-- Grocery shopping

-- Taking apart our fan that broke the other day and figuring out how it worked (all three of us had fun with this!)

-- Going to swim class

-- Reading -- in Lucy's case the first Nancy Clancy book

-- Coming up with lizard schemes (including trying to reuse some fan parts to make it so they can have electricity, and coming up with tiny Christmas decorations for them)

-- Watching Mickey Mouse cartoons

-- Playing with Legos and action figures

-- Writing important messages in code...? (The code lately has been abbreviating each word with the first letter. Super cool, actually.)

Wednesday - Sunday, July 29 - August 2, 2015

On Wednesday, more swim lessons. (This will go on for 4 weeks.) She asked the guys who are teaching the class where they are from ("Europe" LOL I'm curious about a more specific answer, personally!), and dove for some rings (with help).

But before that, we went to the final library program of the summer, which was a magic show put on by a 16-year-old magician. He was great! Great sense of humor and good with the kids. Lucy got picked to help him with one of his tricks! It was long and complicated, and she was very patient and spoke up clearly. It ended with her getting a balloon dog. She was very impressed.

On Thursday she made this great joke:

[That's a rock and some scissors taped to some paper]

On Saturday we went to the local Pride parade:

And then had beignets at the adjacent farmers market:

(Which was a big deal to her since she's been watching Princess and the Frog so often lately.)

Oh and we also saw some break dancers! Oh and Lucy spotted a young person wearing a unicorn headband thing and she was entranced. She "called" her stuffed unicorn on the "phone" to tell her about it, then went up to the girl and told her that she liked it.

Today she was watching a Curious George episode about camping, so she brought her tent out of her bedroom, and took her pillow case off her pillow (for a sleeping bag), and set up this circle of rocks, and found something to be a marshmallow on a stick:

She and Norman also watched The Cat Returns today. Lucy picked it out at the library because she knows Norman likes Miyazaki movies.

Oh she's been so busy with so many schemes... I can't keep track. Today she was rather taken with a particular drag queen that she saw on the roller derby program and at the Pride parade. She got out all the fancy jewelry she could find and had me put blue eyeshadow on her and made a flyer where she changed the drag queen's name to put "Lu" in the middle of it.

She had me put some nuts in an ice cube tray with water and freeze them so she could play hockey with squirrels. (???)

Did I already say that she's obsessed with calling out when the time on the clock is a palindrome? She still is.

She's been big on reading and watching the same thing at the same time. Like, she checked the DVD of Cinderella out of the library so she could watch it while reading her cinestory graphic novel of it that she has. And she checked out both a graphic novel version and a DVD version of a Disney Fairies movie.

Also every now and then she'll just clean the bathroom. Not well, of course. Today it was the mirror.

And I don't remember if I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but at one of the library programs the presenter did Miss Mary Mack with a volunteer, and this was Lucy's attempt at writing it down. I'm so impressed! So much important spelling and transcribing groundwork is here: