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.

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.)

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.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Watched Curious George.

Watched Curious George while reading an entire book about plants? (She said she read the whole thing and this is entirely possible and she kept throwing random plant facts at me including something about ant/tree symbiosis?) She does that sometimes -- like she needs the noise to help her concentrate on the book or something. I understand.

Played outside.

Watched Blue's Clues movie. Was playing on her little piano keyboard along with them (there's a whole long sequence where G-Clef-Ray-Charles explains music).

Played outside.

Spent like 2 hours playing Legos and there was lots of talk of weapons and battles and emergency evacuations.

Children's museum. Cleaned up after other people in the supermarket section, then drew a picture about that. Played in the water table room. Found some pretend horses and fed them fake apples?

Watched Phineas and Ferb.

Drew a blueprint? For something. But like, she used a blue colored pencil.

Friday, June 5, 2015

Watched Pokemon

Played several games on the PBSkids website -- mostly Peg+Cat math games, mostly about fractions.

Watched a bunch of WordGirl.

Played Pokemon Crystal on Norman's computer. Decided to stop playing before she had a meltdown (progress!).

Legos/Duplos.

But like so much WordGirl. It was a WordGirl kinda day, apparently.

Oh, and then she was talking about a character from one of her Disney Fairies comic books that sounded like she was saying "Chole" so I asked her to spell it, so she went and got the book and showed me that it was actually "Chloe". So I asked if she wanted to know how it's pronounced, and she did. And oh boy do I remember pronouncing names wrong for the longest time as a young precocious reader myself.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

Watched Lego Friends while playing with her Friends Legos. (The one where they invent something to prevent dolphin bycatch and then go on a yacht cruise is her favorite.)

Helped me tie dye? Okay, no, I didn't let her use the dyes, but a few weeks ago at Target she picked out which things she wanted dyed, and today she told me what design she wanted and which colors.

Played with her learning clock a little.

Played with her tape measure a bunch.

Decided that she needed to search for something she lost under the couch a long time ago, so this is a the getup she came up with for that mission:

(LOL like possibly we should clean more. In fact this prompted Norman to take the couch apart and vacuum everything.)

She worked on this craft set that I bought at the thrift store a while back. She recognized and could name the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower.

Watched the Scrambled States of America Scholastic DVD she got from the library (twice -- once while reading along with the book).

Played in the sprinkler.

We watched several YouTube videos, including watching the old Disney short cartoon In the Bag, which of course she loved.

Found the mailing address of the publishing company that makes the Disney Fairies graphic novels she's been reading, so she decided she wanted to write them a letter telling them that she likes the books. This turned into a whole ordeal, but before she threw a fit and gave up because it wasn't perfect, she did some writing. 

She has these pads of sticky notes that say "Lucy" on them, so she took several sheets and wrote "Inn" after the "Lucy" and drew little pictures of what it's going to look like at her hotel.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Watched Pokemon

Colored with gel pens. Like a lot. Very studiously.

Asked about how "exactly" locks work, so we watched some YouTube videos that explain it.

Went to the library. Signed up for Summer Reading. Kind of sat right down with a new Disney Fairies comic before I interrupted to ask about another book.

Legos.

Watched Phineas and Ferb.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

When I woke up this morning, she was sitting in my room reading two different books at the same time (Disney Fairies comic and a new Lego ideas book from the library).

Watched Phineas and Ferb

Dumped out all the Duplos and spent quite a while playing with them.

At the end of one of the Disney Fairy comic books, there's about 3 pages of some other comic about teen girls or something, and Lucy showed it to me by saying, "Look, there's an ad for another book in here. I think they only give you a few pages so that you'll buy it because you want to know the rest of what happens!" ::sniff:: I'm so proud of her media savviness!

She built this, which she called a "lizard temple with summoning crystal":

She requested a dress-up app for her tablet, and I spent what seemed like forever looking for a suitable one. Finally found these and downloaded this one. The others will probably follow.

She saw this on my Facebook feed, so we talked about why it's funny:

Watched Pokemon.

Played outside.

Made some more surprise eggs? 

Also she's just been "packing" on and off all week for this road trip we're taking in a while. Like, every time I look at the pile of stuff she wants to take, it's bigger.

She built The Price is Right out of Duplos. 

She was telling me what everything was, and she said, "And the host is showing off a beautiful rose! He can even balance it on his head without getting hurt -- no thorns on him! ...Actually what happened is they picked it very carefully and then cut off all the thorns."  So like, once again, I'm so proud. She can talk something up like she's on QVC and then explain how the whole thing is a sham in the same breath.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Phineas and Ferb.

Mickey's House of Villains.

Bible study -- she played Fruit Ninja, hair salon, and Tetris (although she said it was too hard for her) on her tablet and worked on her KiwiCrate activity book.

She kinda worked on that all day -- learning bug facts and coloring and doing mazes and stuff.

Then she and Norman talked about kiwis and New Zealand and looked at maps.

Then she and I made the dragonfly shooters from the KiwiCrate.

[KiwiCrate is fantabulous. There's kind of a lot of value in one box and it's like its own little fun science curriculum. Use my link and get $10 off (because I get $10 too and I want more).]

She played outside in the sprinkler.

I showed her how to play pyramid solitaire, and then normal(?) solitaire (which she wasn't as interested in), and then War, which was too boring for her.

Watched a Christmas Winnie the Pooh movie. 

Played a game where she came around to each of the adults in the house and had us pick out parts for Lego minifigs and then we had to come up with a name and their "facts". I think she was planning to make a play with them like her theater teacher did with all the kids' made-up characters. But she said maybe it wouldn't work with only 4 characters, so Norman and I mentioned that there are plays with only two people (out of which came the name and basic plot of Waiting for Godot) and even one-person plays. She seemed skeptical.

Asked for a bath. Consented to a toyless bath. That's how much she needed a bath after playing in the sprinkler today. 

Friday, May 22, 2015

Watched Phineas and Ferb.

Went to the post office and grocery store with me. We had to have a talk about not just knowing that you're going to veer away from running into someone at the last minute, but letting the person know you're not going to run into them by moving before it's the last minute. Oy.

She watched Dotty play her Pokemon game.

She's been reading her Lego ideas book kind of a lot. I think she just pores over it in the playroom whenever I'm not looking.

We made some SWAPS! Well, ya know, I ended up making the majority of them, but still. She helped make two different kinds and also made herself a bracelet. And she helped sort the beads.

And she also had her Colorform-type stickers out again.

She and I wrapped presents for Dotty's birthday, and Lucy wrote her a card (with a pun!).

Played Pokemon Crystal.

Started building a Pokemon day care?

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Watched a Disney Fairies movie.

Played with her magnetic pompom set.

Played with her Colorform-type things, which led to a brief discussion about interracial families.

She somehow turned her Monopoly Crazy Cash game into a Pokemon game. She gave me a starter Dollar and it had a name and there were all these rules for my journey through the Money world.

Major Duplo situation involving dumping every single one of them on the floor. And, ya know, a whole bunch of building and storytelling after that.

At lunchtime, I asked if she wanted "berries" with her lunch, and she told me that strawberries aren't actually berries, because berries have their seeds on the inside. Apparently she learned this at the children's museum. Then she told me that, surprisingly, oranges are berries, and that she learned that from Fruit Ninja.

Watched some Phineas and Ferb.

We're working on telling time because I put up minute numbers:

Worked on making a lizard house out of a shoeboxes on the model of the fairy house in The Great Fairy Rescue. Then she gave up on the shoebox and made it with Duplos instead. She packed it all up and took it outside and set it up. She put one little green candy on a tiny plate and noted that maybe the ants would get it, but that the lizard would probably be happy to eat the ants, and then she shouted, "Hey!! I just made a food cycle! The ants eat the candy, and the lizards eat the ants!" [She meant "food chain", obviously.]

Played outside in the sprinkler.

Last Girl Scout meeting of the year. We were introduced to the concept of SWAPS, and she made some, though not as many as she would have liked, so we're planning to make a bunch to give away at the family reunion we're going to this summer. Pinterest has a ton of great ideas, of course! (Also she was quite taken with the word "whatchamacallit", which is apparently the funniest thing she's ever heard.)

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Woke up and immediately started reading her Disney Fairies comic book.

Came with me to Bible study -- watched Frozen (kinda) and used her tablet to play a hair salon game and mess around with the calculator.

Watched Pokemon.

She and I played a new board game I found online last night. Kind of simple, but you get to build your minifig before you start. :-)

Then consequently (long story) we talked about dimensions (one-dimension, two-dimension, three-dimension -- lines, squares, cubes).

She built a Pokemon battle ground (whatever they're called) for the grass types:

Watched a bit of Tangled.

Played outside in the sprinkler. Got brave enough to try to stop the flow of water with her hands, her butt, and a shovel. Decided that she and the sprinkler were going to be BFFs and gave it half of a leaf as a friendship charm.

Built some more cool Lego stuff.

Watched a Disney Fairies movie.

Took some plastic Easter eggs and a bunch of her various small toys and made "toy surprises" like the lady opens on DisneyCollector. Then she used her kids camera to film herself opening them in the style of DisneyCollector (and with amazingly similar syntax and vocal cadence...). 

And then she played outside some more.

And then she took her Pokemon book to bed with her. 

Saturday, May 16, 2015

This morning, with her newly-sorted Legos, she made up a story where an animal rescuer rescued a goblin and gave him a new arm and fed him junk food and media. It was amazing.

While I was at skating, she played Pokemon Crystal while Norman played Brave on the Wii.

While Norman and I were out, she watched Dotty play a different Pokemon game, and they played outside for a little while.

After we got home, Lucy made up another Pokemon (Tentslee? or something?) for me to have for my starter Pokemon in the Cartoon Region, and she gave me my pokeball (plastic easter egg) and pokedex (broken CD case).

Played some games on her tablet.

Hopped on YouTube kids to watch more DisneyCollector videos, but she wanted the ones where the lady dresses the dolls that Lucy has up in new playdoh dresses, so that Lucy could dress hers up in playdoh while she watched.

She made Ariel a seashell button!

She read a book in her playroom, but when I asked she didn't want to tell me which one. She's very weird about admitting to reading. I don't know. But I think the book was a Mickey Mouse comic book we got from the library.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Last theater class -- they weren't preparing for a show, so they just played the movement, self-control, and direction-following games they've been playing. Lucy got a certificate which she is very proud of, and struggled not to cry because she will miss it. They kept saying there will be another class "next fall", and all this time she thought they meant the fall of 2016, so she was very glad to learn about calendar years vs. school years in the car on the way home. :-)

Oh and she played basketball before theater class because that's what they do because it's held in a gym.

She's been working on a Lego hotel, so at the moment she's working on the water slide for the pool.

Amazon shipment day! We got a new container for her Legos, a set of 64 (SIXTY-FOUR) different colors of markers (which I want to keep for myself but I'm resisting), and a bluetooth keyboard for her tablet. I need to find a good typing game for her... Oh, and the box it all came in is huge and if I get my way it will be turned into a TARDIS, but at the moment she's just using it as an awesome fort.

The keyboard set her off on playing several of her tablet apps, and she eventually wound up on the PBS kids website, playing Peg + Cat and Dinosaur Train games.

Watched Kiki's Delivery Service.

Then decided that we need to start our own delivery service.

I installed a (pirate themed!) learn-to-count-money app on her tablet, and she immediately took it and started playing it.

Drew a picture of an "alicorn" because we looked it up because one of the girls in one of the plays last night was playing one.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Phineas and Ferb

Pokemon

Pokemon Crystal game on Norman's computer

Legos. Always Legos. Today she made a car for all the Lego animals to ride in. She said, "You didn't know animals could drive, did you?" I said, "No -- it must be a crazy car!" And she said, "No, it's a car in cartoonland!"

Checking our "travel registration"(?) to make sure we were eligible for tickets to her play.

And rather the biggie for today -- she was in a play!  She's spent the last 3 months attending a theater class one day a week. They did lots of games to increase control over their own bodies (like Red Light Green Light and Statues), learned stage directions, and created their own characters and made up a plot for their (5-10 minute) play.

Lucy did amazing! The character she came up with was entirely original, she spoke up clearly and wasn't at all shy, and was just all around delightful. She also watched the other two classes' plays, including the teenagers' Shakespeare mashup, which she seemed to enjoy despite it being, in her words, a little too long.  She's already said she's excited to take the class again in the fall.

Here she is, introducing her character. (She also came up with most of the costume.)

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

She keeps making up her own Pokemon, complete with powers and what they evolve into. "Helperd", "Antidoi" (can heal other Pokemon), and "Laurabee" (which is like a bee, can't fly when wet, and the females evolve into Lauraqueen and the males evolve into Lauraking). I can't keep track of which ones are real and which ones she made up!

She put together a kit to help warriors when they're hurt or their swords break. It has a flashlight, scissors, several rolls of tape, her magicband...

She watched a bunch of Pokemon.

She played with her Monopoly Crazy Cash game. (She got this as a birthday present from a friend and has messed around with the pieces pretty much every day since then. Possibly because all the other board games are put away out of her reach so she can't lose the pieces...)

She and I had a very illuminating conversation at the library

me: [trying to think of books she might like to check out] You know there's some Fancy Nancy books where she's a grown up kid and she's a detective?

Lucy: Yeah, I know! I have one!

me: [remembering that I bought one at last year's library book sale] Oh, yeah, right.  

Lucy: I'm not sure detecting stuff is for kids.

me: ??? Well, they write the books about kids detecting for kids to read...

Lucy: Yeah, I read it. It was about a lost marble.

me: Really?? Did she find it?

Lucy: Yeah, she found the marble.

me: Oh! I'm just surprised -- I didn't know you read it because I didn't ever see you reading it.

Lucy: Yeah, I read it really fast. I read really fast, so it was kinda...

me: Well, they have more -- do you want another one?

Lucy: Yeah, sure. Get me the longest one.

me: [goes over and gets all three that they have on the shelf]

Lucy: Yeah, I already read this one -- this is the one about the marble. [The first one: "Nancy Clancy: Super Sleuth"]

me: Oh, okay. Do you want the other two?

Lucy: Sure.

Okay, I typed this whole thing out because I really, really had NO idea that she had read the book. Or that she had ever sat down by herself and read a chapter book. I had been working on the assumption that although her reading ability is up to the challenge of almost any book, her attention span and perhaps her physical mechanisms involved (eyes, etc) where not up to it. But no -- apparently it turns out that all the books she has are just too short?? She goes through them too fast so they're boring?? I also talked her into getting the second Boxcar Children book (since she loves the first one, and the rest are mysteries). We'll see if she reads them, I guess. At the same time, she's always turning down my offers to read Narnia or Harry Potter or Mysterious Benedict Society, etc, etc, to her at bedtime. Sometimes I think she just needs to make her own way so badly that she'll turn down anything as long as I suggested it.

Oh, and she also used the library DVD alphabetizing to find the movies she was looking for. (She pretty much has first letters down pat. The rest of the spelling, not so much.)

Also I don't think I've mentioned here yet that she now has her own library card, and she knows how to check to see if things are due and how to put things on hold with her library account on her tablet.

She built this hotel room furniture. I love it! The bed is so fancy, and all the luggage is on top of the A/C window seat combo.

Also we gave her a flashlight and she's been reading her Pokemon handbook in her bed every night before she goes to sleep. 

Nov 5-9, 2014

Post-vacation time has brought a predictably cranky 5 year old, but also a 5 year old who is remarkably content to get back to her own stuff, her own backyard, and autonomy over her own time.

Lots of playing outside, including "cooking", possibly creating a restaurant or drive-thru place in her tiny playhouse, and dressing up in her swim suit and trying to find a high place to put her lawn chair so she can be a lifeguard.

Lots of watching Phineas and Ferb. And of course responding to Phineas and Ferb by incorporating their schemes into her schemes.

Bike race map:

Copying the names of the Phineas and Ferb songs from the liner notes of her CD (this may have happened before the vacation...):

(And this is on the back:)

Trying to pause an episode at just the right place so that she can copy some words from the closed captioning. She's been quite ingenious lately with different ways to figure out how to spell/write things. Lots of copying from other place where she knows it's already written down.

Girl scout manual:

"Mom, what's an amp hi theater?"

These are bidding paddles for an auction? I've been told?

We put together both the Lego sets she got in Florida. In both cases, she actually got a lot of it done by just following the instructions before she got frustrated and yelled for me to help her.

We went to the library and she found even more tricks to that story typing game (and had the computer pronounce more of her nonsense typing).

She went to her Girl Scout meeting, and they talked about lions, and ways we can take care of pets. She actually gave a really accurate and pithy summary of an anecdote from The Boxcar Children that was on topic!

First staking lesson at her new level. I think they did ice bowling or something.

In Sunday school they talked about this parable and made little paper suitcases and filled them with pictures of (according to her) "4 tips for making God happy." And then after church she played with one of her friends at the park. I heard the following choice snippets: "We can both be Elsa! Two Elsas!" and "We're both mermaids. All that is the water." and "You pretend to be a witch and you're trying to get me!" Good times...

Been reading some Phineas and Ferb books from the library before bed. Which I don't mind because I like doing the voices.

Disney World (Oct 30 - Nov 4, 2014)

Well, we went to Disney World! It's a short day of driving from our house, so it was great to finally get down there. This will be a Lucy-centric accounting of what went on.

[pit stop]

We met up with my mom, dad, and brother, so she got to spend some time with extended family.

[playing the dots and squares game with her uncle]

Grandma and Grandpa have been living/working in Trinidad recently, so they brought her a Trinidadian flag, a map, some currency, and a parrot feather!

She found a fountain/splash pad thing our first night there, and was way more interested in actually getting wet than any of the other kids there:

We had the opportunity to take several ferry rides and many bus rides. On one of the bus rides, it was standing room only, and we were standing in front of a boy her age and his mom. Lucy struck up a very pleasant conversation with him about their clothes and school and cousins and all sorts of things.

On the drives down and back, she worked on a road trip workbook I made for her (mazes, design your own license plates and road signs, finish the robot drawing, etc.), played some tablet apps (Word Girl design your own superheroes, Fruit Ninja, etc.), and somehow generally kept herself occupied and clear of any whining. It was great!

Our hotel's pool had a big slide, and after some encouragement from Norman (and some random ladies in the pool), and a polite request that the lifeguard let Norman and Lucy go down it together the first time, she was going down it by herself!

[That blur in the middle of the slide is the two of them.]

Speaking of our little daredevil, we took her on Splash Mountain (a glorified log ride), and she loved it. I mean, I'm pretty sure I didn't like it as much as she did. She said it was "stunning scary! But the good kind!" She also loved us spinning the tea cup ride as fast as it could go. Plus two different carousels and It's a Small World and the Dumbo ride. Pirates of the Caribbean, not so much, because we forgot her headphones. Loud noises -- no; steep fast drops -- yes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We rode Spaceship Earth and learned about history. We rode The Seas with Nemo and visited the aquarium and learned about fish and manatees and stuff.

She played Agent P's World Showcase Adventure and learned about Mexico:

She read the clues and multiple choice options herself, and it turns out her phonics must be okay, because she can also read "Adios Amigos".

We met Merida and she shot a bow and arrow. We met Tinkerbell (while Lucy was dressed as Tinkerbell), and Tinkerbell asked what kind of inventions *she'd* been working on, and I mentioned her lizard trap ideas, and Tinkerbell suggested maybe Lucy could help her with her ladybug spotter invention and they pinky promised and it was *adorable*. She met Sofia (big head -- can't talk) and insisted on showing her that Sofia was on her autograph notebook. (We met quite a few characters. Lucy did a great job, even if she was a little overwhelmed and didn't always know what to say or how to react.)

We went to the Lego store and she built her own minifigs (an astronaut who got beat up in space, a lady who is moving, and an economist), and spent her souvenir money on two Lego sets, one of which we put together the day after we got home (and she helped quite a bit with that -- she put together the little oven/stove by following the instructions before she even asked for my help).

We visited an Irish pub and they had some dancers who invited the kids to dance with them, and she definitely did!

[She's the one on the right in the purple dress]

Not that this is out of the ordinary, but she was very well-spoken and polite to all the servers at the sit-down restaurants we went to. She knew what she wanted, and she said it!

Oh, and she found a word in a word search on one of the kids menus! I don't think she's ever done that by herself before.

We played air hockey in the arcade!

And there was a candy shop where you fill out a form to pick which thing you want, covered in which chocolate and which topping, and she wrote her name on it (with the new creative spelling she's been trying out) and put an 'x' next to the things she wanted.

We saw a couple stage shows -- a Frozen one with live actors, and a Disney Junior one with puppets. She loved both of them (of course).

Hollywood Studios has this cool playground that looks like you're in Honey I Shrunk the Kids -- she really enjoyed that, I think. Especially with all the talk about lizards lately.

[see, it's a slide, but it's a roll of film. eh? eh??]

On our last day, she found a prop/photo op car, climbed in, and made Norman sit in it with her while she rattled off a long spiel that seemed to be a combination of the recorded announcements from the buses and the ferries. Very professional, apparently.

We saw several different types of lizards and birds around the property. The ferry driver said they had otters, but we never saw any!

She brought Magic School Bus books with her, so I read her at least one of those while we were gone. Volcanos, I think?

She drew this calculator on the last day while we packed up:

["In 'off', does the 'ff' come at the beginning or the end?"]