Sunday, November 29, 2015

Lucy is spelling! On Monday she spelled "peekaboo" out loud in the car. (You could have knocked me over with a feather -- I had no idea she could do that.) And tonight she just left a note outside her bedroom door for us to find, on which she attempted to spell things by herself!! I'm terribly excited. She has been copying the words she wants from books for a long time. This is the first time I've seen her attempt to spell things without asking for help and be willing to spell things wrong (which she did).

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 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:

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.

Friday, May 29, 2015

Started my day by explaining how, exactly, to alphabetize.

Fairy dress up game.

I gave her some new wooden food that you can cut up with a book about food fractions (which she is ignoring in favor of just cutting the food).

Watched Pokemon.

Norman asked her a little kid question meme while I was gone getting my hair dyed, and she gave lots of fun answers, but the last one is the best:

How old was your dad when you were born? 

[She went over to her 100 wall chart] "Let's see here. I was born six years ago, and you are the age 31 now, so if my answer would be correct, [counts six spaces back from 31] you were... 26 years old when I was born."

So like... whoa. And once we told her that you'd count like it's a board game, she got the right answer (for Norman's age when she was born -- 25).

Dressed up like a "warrior" (science goggles, play wooden cutting board, giant tongs).

Watched Norman play the Brave Wii game.

Went on a random Blue's Clues watching spree. And possibly learned the names of all the planets as a result.

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.

Week of October 20, 2014

Play date with church friends.

Copying the titles of songs from the Phineas and Ferb soundtrack on paper and the chalkboard.

She spied a poster behind a counter at our grocery store above a fire extinguisher that said "P.A.S.S." and she wanted to know what that meant. Once I figured out what she was talking about, she got spelling, mnemonics, acronyms, and fire safety all at once! (It stands for pull the pin, aim, squeeze the trigger, and sweep it back and forth.) And we talked about when something can be solved with a fire extinguisher and when you need to just get out and call the fire department.

We read a book about time zones on Monday or Tuesday. Then on Sunday she heard one of our fellow parishioners talking about how she used to live in Hawaii and Lucy jumped right in with questions about which time zone Hawaii is in and how many hours difference it is and when exactly she changed her clocks when she moved here.

Made a conveyer belt (her words) for her cash register out of a whole bunch of colored tape.

Library. Dora game and that story typing game. She figured out how to color the backgrounds of the pages and draw shapes.

Turned our coat closet into an elevator with the addition of a piece of paper with two arrow buttons on it.

We read a book about keeping lizards as pets.

She's started making plans again for the hotel she's going to open in our house. This is a picture of all the amenities that room service can provide upon request:

[Bibles, soap, pads of paper, pens, bottles of water, candy, newspapers, iPods, .... and I kinda lost track of what was happening after that]

Lots of Phineas and Ferb (show and soundtrack).

We've been taking walks (well, she mostly rides in the wagon) around the neighborhood and to the post office some days.

Last skating lesson of the session and she passed her test! And we signed her up for the next session at her request. At this point she seems to be gunning for hockey player in a year or two.

Sunday school: talked about about the greatest commandment and another is like unto it. And she remembered what they talked about last week! "They were trying to trick Jesus by asking him a question about a coin with their leader on it." I'm just amazed that she was paying attention.

We took a walk in the forest-y part of a park today, and I started explaining about the Doctor Who episode last night (which she did not see), but it turned into a discussion about the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle.

Then we walked to a trunk or treat at a church down the street from us (she dressed up as a fairy princess). Then we played at the park for a bit. Oh, and we saw some raccoons! Just hanging around a tree in a neighbor's front yard in the middle of the day just as cool as they could be. A different neighbor had some major tree work done a couple days ago -- I think maybe they were displaced. They were cool to see, though.

[She drew the plant on the piece of paper, see? (This is at a friend's house.)]

[House lizard flag]

Week of October 6, 2014

This week's theme was apparently "make stuff with my hands". She's been super into building outside -- this includes heaving heavy things like bricks up into her play fort, wrapping an old hose around all sorts of stuff up there, and hammering nails into scraps of wood (some of which we found in a curb pile on our way walking back from the post office one day this week). She's also been using her scissors a lot to cut out shapes to construct things. She made a house lizard shirt and tried to make a Vanessa costume for her teddy bear Jane (but the project was thwarted by the Scotch tape not sticking well enough to the piece of thick plastic sheeting she was using).  Also capes for Duplo animals:



And pathways and sidewalks made from all sorts of blocks, including, at times, dominos:

Speaking of house lizards, it turns out Jane is going to be the priest of their church. And Lucy is going to be their "Lord", so their church will mostly be "Lucy-themed". (These are her words, obviously.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

We went to a big book sale and bought a bunch of great stuff, including two books on lizards/reptiles. She spent a good portion of the trip sitting in her stroller reading a large easy reader volume about DC superheroes. Possibly she read the whole thing. When she was done with that, she spent some time looking at the map they gave us at the door.  She read that we should leave the map for other people to use when we were done, and suggested this to me. I told her we didn't need to, but then she pointed out that it said it on the map. And then when we got home she said if our reusable shopping bag broke, we could take it back to Harris Teeter and they'd give us a new one. I told her I didn't think that's how that worked, but she pointed to the bottom of the bag where it said exactly that!  Mommy needs to do more reading, apparently.

At the library she found this fire safety sheet that had a fire extinguisher, a smoke alarm, and exit signs on it. She decided since we have the first two things in our house, but no exit signs, she would make some. Which she did, with stickers and no help from me.

This Lego Friend went shopping for some "cool new outfits".

We're planning a trip to Disney World, so one afternoon this week we decorated out Magic Bands. Temporary tattoos and nail polish. (She made style and design decisions and I executed them.)

At church today they went through the first 5 of the Ten Commandments and she drew this. "God", "1 God", a smile ("for nice things, etcetera, etcetera"), a cross ("take a day of rest the day you go to church"), a heart and me and Norman ("love your mom and dad!"). Nailed it.

She's spent the last two days pouring over this really cool book we got at last year's book sale.

Bedtime reading matter has included Phineas and Ferb books and The Boxcar Children (again). 

And she's been using the tablet to watch Phineas and Ferb, of course. And to go to the local shopping mall's website. She just loves doing that for some reason. She also spends a lot of time looking at the mall maps that she picks up pretty much every time she's there so now she has like 3 of them.

And skating lessons are still going well.

And we went to the library and she played that story writing game again (her favorite). And she was writing all these stories just using the "stickers" (little icons) that they have. But then the game decided that she had used up her allotment of stickers, so she clicked on the sticker she wanted, and the name of the thing shows up beneath it, so she just typed the name of it instead!

Week of September 29, 2014

Okay, we're gonna try this summing up the week thing.

She spent a lot of time outside this week. The weather has been lovely! She's been digging and "cooking" and swinging and getting herself all disgustingly wet and muddy -- it's great!

Still watching some Phineas and Ferb, but not as much as a couple weeks ago. It's cooling.

She asked to make gelatin, so we did that this week with grape juice. She decided she didn't like it.

She asked to make an apple pie, so we did that this week. She mostly just helped with mixing the ingredients for the crusts. Then I did the rest of it. But she came back to help use the cookie cutters on the extra pie crust to make cookies. She decided she doesn't like the pie. (??? It is delicious if I do say so myself.)

She wrote this on the calendar with absolutely no input from me (meant to say "driving eve"):

Still talking about the house lizards all the time. Here we have a note written in lizard tongue sticking out language (obviously):

Grocery shopping. Library. She played with that story writing computer game again. It's a big hit.

She also used her tablet this week to have Google translate say things out loud again. And she finished a section of her geography game. And she and Norman worked some more on the Phineas and Ferb game.

Girl scout meeting. She got inducted or whatever they call it.

Skating lessons. She's doing awesome. 

She wanted to try climbing the trees in our front yard. She got up pretty high in this one!

Lots of Duplos and Legos, as always. 

She tried to pour herself some juice. That was an adventure, but she got the juice out of the fridge and got herself a cup and everything all by herself without asking. Which I actually consider a step in the right direction.

Sunday school, we talked about St Francis and made bird feeders out of pipe cleaners and Cheerios.

Then we went to our church's Blessing of the Animals this afternoon. She got her teddy bear blessed and played on the playground for awhile. :-)

Bedtime reading has been books about Lego Friends and Disney Fairies and assorted other advertainment, but ::shrug::  

Oh yeah, and when Norman and I were cleaning her playroom, we found a strip of paper where she'd written all the numbers up to 20 or so out in a row, mostly correctly. This is a big deal! She didn't want to write most numbers for the longest time. And she's also been writing random letter and number combos on some old checks I gave her to play with.

Friday, September 5, 2014

She woke me up about to fill out the Girl Scout form for herself. I convinced her to wait and let me do most of it. Later this made her want to make her own form. She spelled "no" by herself for it. She said, "I saw it in my head!"

I gave her two little cork boats I'd made, and some toothpicks, and she made sails and put Lego people on them and floated them in her turtle pool in the backyard. Then she got into the turtle pool herself. Then she was playing with the hose sprayer. While it was raining.

There was some angst off and on during the day about her self-predicted ability to abide by the Girl Scout Law. We had a nice talk about how those are things we try to do anyway, and everyone messes up sometimes, and the important thing is to say sorry and try again. (I feel her, BTW. I put off saying the Sinner's Prayer to "officially" become a Christian for about 2 years past the point that my evangelical upbringing had me convinced that I needed to do it to be saved, because I just wasn't so sure that I really wanted to officially decide to always obey my parents and do the right thing. True story. I like having options.)

But then again, later she was trying to copy the ice breaker Bingo card we took home from the scout meeting last night. She made the grid and copied about 4 words before it was bedtime.

She also played Super Mario Galaxy with Norman. And she was fiddling with the Miis again earlier. This is practically a daily occurrence.

She spent a significant amount of time playing with her dolls and Lego people, including making them have a loud, long, and incredibly unproductive argument about nothing.

Before bed I read her Miniature Reptiles, and we learned the proper name for our house lizards! Green anoles, apparently. Then she was telling Norman about it (he was in the other room while we were reading), and he asked her if she meant green "gecko", and she very quickly got upset and lost confidence. So we had a nice chat about how if you're the person who read the book, then you're the person who knows, so you're the person who gets to explain it, and other people can be wrong, even if they're older than you.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

OK. Today. Let's see. Phineas & Ferb game on the tablet. (FYI, this game is all about cause-and-effect physics stuff and the different states of water.) She also used it to watch some Word Girl. 

She watched this Mickey Mouse Clubhouse DVD she got from the library. It's awful, but they're big on making choices to solve problems.

Either today or yesterday she was typing out numbers in order and the alphabet in Wii messages, with the intent of teaching little kid house lizards at her little kid house lizard kindergarten.

She spent a long time today coming up with superhero titles for each of us and what our powers are. She also got out her number dry erase workbook in order to use it as a list. Beside each number is a plan for defeating bad guys. These are the kind of hieroglyphics she draws (very influenced by her Blue's Clues days, I think). For instance, she told me that plan #3 is "lie to the bad guy about where our hideout is" (house, speech bubble, person, sound waves, bad guy person).

I think she also drew some sort of newspaper.  

Oh and she had me help her make a pattern with her beads.

And then we went to a Girl Scout meeting! She seemed to really enjoy it. We mostly played ice breaker / getting to know you type games. It got a little loud for her at one point, but other than that it was good. We played a game that resulted in her writing down some names I helped her spell, and writing her own name about 10 times. She also wrote down "me" while I wasn't looking! She spoke up nice and loud when it was her turn to introduce herself, and she made sure to ask exactly what it was she was getting into when she read the Girl Scout promise with the rest of the girls. :-)  Pretty sure she's in, so I've got some shopping to do and some paperwork to fill out!

And we didn't read a book before bed, because she wanted me to read the Girl Scout Law and the Girl Scout Promise and go over the calendar with her instead.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Well, I didn't blog all weekend. But that's okay, because the entirety of the last three days can pretty much be summed up with the words "HOUSE LIZARDS". How can we catch house lizards? Everyone must contribute ideas. We grownups are running out of ideas that make sense, but we must keep coming up with more. There are nets, there are baskets, there is an actual Duplo maze, with a trail of leaves, leading to a Duplo building, the opening of which will be blocked up once the lizards are inside. We discuss how to get the lizards to not be scared of us, and how to make them feel at home once they're in our house. There are a lot of bug-flavored and -scented things, and a lot of green things. At one point she gathered up her greenest action figures and placed them around the kitchen counters. Maybe we should all wear green shirts. Maybe we should put dead bugs in our shoes so our feet will smell like bugs. Maybe she should put some pictures of grass up in her room. All she wants to do is talk about lizards. Possibly a visit to a pet store is in order in the near future.

Other than that, today anyway... We went to the grocery stores. I explained the difference between strength and leverage using the example of kneading dough on a low counter vs a high counter. She seemed to understand?

She played Mario Kart. She made new Miis. She spelled the word "guy" on her own without any help. That was cool.

She played some Peg + Cat games on the tablet.

She actually helped me clean her playroom. This may have been due to the fact that I told her she couldn't be in it while I was cleaning it unless she was helping. She finally gave in and completed one task admirably.

She watched Norman play Super Mario Galaxy while checking stuff in the manual. (Quite a regular occurrence around here.)

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Tablet: Cat in the Hat show; Phineas and Ferb app.

Messing with the Wii Miis and settings again. Just poking around really. She typed out some more messages with my spelling help.

I made a bunch of water balloons. Norman and she and I had a water balloon party in the backyard. I hung some from strings from the monkey bars, so she got some swatting/batting practice in.  Then she spent quite a bit more time out there splashing in her little turtle pool, riding her bike, and who knows what all else.

At one point she was playing on her street map rug with some Duplo people... It seemed there was an earthquake (i.e., she picked up part of the rug and everyone said, "Aaaahhhh!")

Word Girl on the tablet.

I read her Family and Friends before bed.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Messed around with the Miis again. This pretty much always results in my spelling things for her so she can change their names. Then she figured out that you can send little messages within the Wii system (somehow?), and she had me spell "I love you" for her. Then she wrote another note that said "I love you too", and she only asked for help with the 'v' and the 'too'.

Watched VeggieTales.

Played that Phineas and Ferb game.

We went to the grocery stores.  In the car on the way home she asked how the people who write Bibles come up with the stories to put in them. Good question! And also it sounded like she thought "Bible" was like... a genre of literature, or something? So we talked about what translation means, and how Jewish people and Christians wrote things down a long time ago, and how some people go to school to learn how to read the stories in the original language and then they tell other people what they've found out. Then she asked, "But how did the first teachers know the things to teach?" Whoa. So I started with Jesus and how since Christians believe he's God, that means he knows things only God would know and he taught them to people while he was here and people wrote down what he said, and that's some of the Bible. And how other people an even longer time ago wrote down things that other people who talked to God, like Moses, taught people. So that means that Jewish people and Christians have all been reading the same stories over and over again for a really long time, trying to figure out what they mean and what God wants us to do. (So possibly she's even more confused now than when she asked? Yeah, religion is like that...)

I think I glimpsed her reading a comic book before lunch.

Watched Word Girl.

Read the Super Mario Galaxy manual for a while. It mentioned the Wii manual, so she wanted to know if we had one (presumably so she could read it, too, but I don't think we have it).

Read books about service dogs and guide dogs out loud to Norman.

Played outside. Some of this was spent trying to use her new hula hoop.

I read her the service dog book before bed.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Grocery shopping day. She got to try out her brand new answer to almost every question she'll get in public places for the foreseeable future: "I'm homeschooled!"

Played Super Mario Galaxy upon waking.

Spent a good long while with the dolls. She set up like this little bedroom thing inside an empty clear plastic tub even though she owns a dollhouse. ???

She and I played Scrabble. Kinda. We spelled words on the board. She is amazingly consistent at knowing what letter a word starts with, but anything after that she just kinda gives up. I got her to figure out the last letter in "leg" by telling her to pretend like she could see the word on a piece of paper in her head. She got it in a snap. Cool.

She and Norman played Super Mario Galaxy together. Sounded like they've actually been talking about, like, space science as a result of this. Like, planet, solar system, galaxy, star, etc.

After dinner I showed her her new tablet that came in the mail. She was quite pleased with taking photos and videos, and then she found the Netflix app and was very serious about that, which is weird because she can watch Netflix whenever she wants on the TV with the Wii. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (It's super cool -- it's a small Android tablet, but it has a kid's mode that can be controlled by a parent. I can pick which apps she can access and set time limits, and then I can also switch it to normal mode for the grown ups.)

I finished reading her a book about jobs in the video game design industry.

Bonus hot dog cart from over the weekend:

Sunday, August 10, 2014

   

Sunday = church. She made a boat out of a sponge, a toothpick, and a piece of paper that she decorated for a sail, because the Gospel reading today was about Jesus and Peter walking on water. She also proved that she can actually sing along with the hymns when I point to each word if she feels like it. (She picks up on tunes pretty fast, actually.) Oh, and the children's bulletin had a crossword in it, and she read and answered the first two question, but then she didn't want to write the answers in. (??)

After church = coffee hour at the park. She played on the playground for a while.

Today was extra exciting, because we went to a community theater production of Hairspray! She and I heard a commercial for it on the radio earlier this last week, so I looked it up. We both have the movie pretty much memorized, so I figured she'd like it. She was so excited and just kind of in amazed awe, and definitely dancing at certain points. She got a little antsy in the middle, especially during the parts that weren't in the movie, but she did quite admirably for a 5-year-old Lucy. (She wore her noise-cancelling earmuffs -- these are an absolute must for us at any kind of busy or loud event, especially theaters of any sort. She just does not handle loud noises well. Like, if you're reading this, and your kid has any kind of noise sensitivity, do yourself a favor, and just buy some, and let them wear them. Ignore the parts where 1.) they look out of place, and 2.) they are normally associated with your kid having some sort of diagnostic label. Just give them the earmuffs and make everyone's life easier and better.)  

We also met a couple of the actors afterward. (They were all standing around on stage, so I asked if she wanted to talk to them, and she's not shy!)

 

While we were waiting for the play to start, she read The Great Big Book of Families to herself. (Which is a really great book that we picked up from the library. Detailed illustrations that are fun to look at, and it does a great job of showing all different kinds of families -- including talking about the range of socioeconomic privilege -- very simply, straightforwardly, and without judgment.)

And on the way home she perused the playbill with the actors' info.

After we got home, she built this, which she called her "dream office".

During dinner she was looking at the calendar (a current fascination), and decided to spell out Labor Day so I wouldn't know what she was saying (like Norman and I do around her sometimes -- this drives her CRAZY). She read the letters off just right. I didn't really know she could do that.

We read Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum before bed.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Lucy's 5th birthday is in three days!  The weather has been gorgeous here for the last couple weeks, so she has been spending hours on end in the backyard. She makes fake food with water, dirt, and leaves; she contrives plans to trap and/or befriend bugs, birds, and lizards; she digs holes; she rides her bikes; and she just generally runs around doing goodness knows what. 

Today we went to the library and picked up the latest Disney Fairies movie, The Pirate Fairy. (Actually not to bad, as far as Disney Fairies movies go.) She watched it, loved it, and then apparently (when I wasn't looking), built this contraption similar to the one the fairy uses in the movie to make different kinds of pixie dust. That's a water wheel with tape, glue, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, and leaves. 

 

She also wanted to get on her computer after she watched the movie to look up more stuff about it. When she's using the computer, she'll consistently ask me, "What's the next letter in [whatever word she's going to search]," because she knows the first letter for pretty much anything she wants to spell. Cool.

And she made me this thank you card to thank me for... helping her catch house lizards? Not quite sure [but that's definitely a house lizard and a trap].

 

I read her a Tangled book that she got in the mail today for her birthday, but she had already read it to herself immediately upon opening the package! 

 

[Note the unopened bubble wrap thing and the card that had to wait]