Hello blog. It's been a while.
Allison is four and a half, and continuing on a pretty decent trajectory into becoming a school kid.
She's going to her preschool five days a week, minus some days when grandparents take her on some adventure or another. Preschool was a little tough at the beginning, because Allison is by nature relatively shy and more introverted than extroverted, but over time she has really blossomed there. She has four or five best friends there (Jordyn, Kaya, Ayu, Little Hannah, Rio…) and frequently they're all super excited to see each other when we drop her off. If her friends are already there, they'll scream "Allison is here! Allison is here!" and they'll all run off to play. Her teachers report that everything is good with her.
Diana is leading the charge in looking for kindergartens for her. She's gone to visit a couple schools already, some public and some private. So far, she's had a bad feeling about one public school, a good feeling about another, and a good feeling about the private school, but isn't sure that the cost is justified. It's starting to feel like a pretty big deal to choose the right school. Or at least choose the school that feels most likely to lead to happiness and success and whatever. I hope we can find a good public school for her. (Or, alternatively, that I can overcome by prejudice against private schools).
At home, she ranges from being a lot of fun to a dramatic mess. She can be so cute and imaginative, playing with her little toys and things. She narrates everything, like she's telling a story, which gives us a lot of great insight into what she's thinking. She can be really clingy, as well, demanding a lot of attention and being pretty unhappy if we're unwilling or unable to play with her. Diana is very patient to sit and play imaginative games with her, while I have a hard time with that. However, I can play Legos and catch and tag and hide and seek and wrassle with her for hours. So it works out pretty well. She's not particularly affectionate or cuddly, but when she is we eat it up. She wakes us up every morning by climbing into bed with books to read, and that is always a fun time.
She's somewhat fallen under the allure of "girls toys", and seems to be attracted to the pink aisle. We don't specifically encourage this (she has plenty of princess toys), but also consciously try to steer her towards other things as well. Her little squishy animals (frogs, snakes, and bugs) are a favorite, as well as little Lego people.
She's very interested in drawing and coloring right now, as well as writing. She can read and sound out words, but doesn't show a whole lot of interest in it. However, she'll write extended sentences on her white board, or get a piece of paper and write a letter (or even type an email) to a friend or grandparent. She writes everything out phonetically, so it's sometimes hard to decipher, but she's very enthusiastic about it. She drew some shapes and labeled them TRIGOL, REKTAGOL, and SQWER, for example. I'm not sure how much I should be correcting her spelling, but mostly I just encourage her. She can do basic addition and subtraction pretty well, and we're sneaking in the framework for multiplication and division as well (like, "if you have three 2's, how many is that?" or cutting up an orange and dividing it into three equal piles for us).
She had her four year checkup recently, and while she's in general very good health, was diagnosed with amblyopia, which I take to mean a fancy way of saying that her eyes don't see at the same strength. That is, the vision in her left eye is noticeably worse than the vision of her right eye. To help correct this, she saw an ophthalmologist who prescribed glasses to be worn all day for 6-8 weeks. She had a follow-up appointment this morning, which showed that her eyes were improving, but that she should also wear a patch over her good eye for two hours a day for 8 weeks. The idea is to help the bad eye catch up and improve. So we'll see how that goes. Glasses haven't been too much of a struggle, so hopefully the patches won't be too tough either. I'm sure if we relax our "minimal screen time" policy that will make things easier. Other than that, aside from snotty noses and coughs, she's been in very good health. She's long and lean and active. She's a fast runner and great climber. She recently made it across the monkey bars completely on her own.
That's it for now. Mike and Gwen have just had their baby, Logan, and that event has brought back a lot of memories, as well as a bit of a contrast to see just how much Allison has grown. She's really a joy, and we both go in and look at her while she sleeps and just kind of stand in shock and awe at how much we love her.
No comments:
Post a Comment