Sister Bear Goes to Preschool!

(Due to an apparent, latent Berenstain Bears influence, I have been calling Anna, “Sister Bear,” since she was an infant.)

So…it is currently 12:12 pm on a Monday, and I am sitting here typing in a house without children.

It’s kind of eerie.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.

The peacefulness is nice, but there is a big part of me that is thinking, “Where are my KIDS???”

Even though I am ambivalent and even a bit emotional over my “empty nest,” I can tell you for sure how Anna feels about it: she is pumped! She has been ready for preschool since Luke’s first day last year, when she cried and cried that she couldn’t go, too. Thus, she was more than ready for Open House last Thursday:

Upon entering her classroom, Anna got to work on a little “Welcome” coloring sheet. Luke immediately assumed the role of worldly, experienced, big brother, and walked her through every step, complete with enthusiastic encouragement toward all her actions.

While they were working, Anna’s teacher, Ms. Stephanie, came over to meet her, but she had a hard time distracting the kids’ attention away from their Very Important Project.

She finally succeeded in taking Anna to see her cubby and her communication folder:

This is Anna’s picture face. She’s trying to smile, but always comes off looking skeptical of the whole thing.

Ms. Stephanie also gave Anna some goodies, which she was very excited to show to Luke.

By this time, Luke had totally taken over coloring Anna’s picture.

They ended up working together to finish it.

She left the classroom more ready than ever for school to start. And then, today was the big day:

It was foggy and super-muggy this morning, so my lens kept fogging up. But isn’t she cute?

Walking into school with Daddy.

Finding her cubby on her own.

And in case you were wondering, yes, onlookers do give me weird looks for taking a freakishly obsessive amount of pictures.

But when you have subjects as beautiful, and moments as fleeting as these, what can you do?

(Answer: take more pictures.)

Packing her cubby.

Hugging Daddy goodbye.

And getting started with her school day.

I will write her take on her day in a little while, but first…I’ve got to go pick my baby up!

Update:

Predictable, Anna loved school. Her teacher said that she had a great day and added, "I had no idea that she knew how to write her name!" Um, I didn't either. (And for the record, she could not replicate that little miracle at home.) Her teacher also said that she drew a great self-portrait today and really impressed them with her artistic talent. Unlike Luke on his first day of preschool, Anna was VERY forthcoming with information. She told me that she learned three of her classmate's names: Evan, Cannon, and Sophia. She said that her favorite part of school was playing on the playground, but that two of the slides had puddles on them. She said she went to music class, and Mrs. Shelly was her teacher, and she sang, "Jesus Loves Me," the alphabet song, and a new song about five little frogs, which she sang for me. I asked if she liked Mrs. Shelly, and she said, "Yes, I like to sing with her." I asked if she liked the lunch I packed, and she said, "Yes! It was dewicious!" I asked if she went to gym, and she said, "Yeah, we played with balls and sat criss-cross applesauce, and there were squares, and we finded a square." She didn't know her gym teacher's name, but she volunteered that her "face was the same color as Orange." Orange Blossom is one of Anna's Strawberry Shortcake dolls, and she is African-American. Since Anna has never described someone like this, I asked if she knew any other people whose face was the same color as Orange's. She said there was a girl in her class, but no one else. I asked if there was anyone at church, and she said no. So now I'm really curious about the gym teacher's ethnicity, since Anna knows lots of African Americans at church. I asked what Anna did in the classroom (after grabbing a pencil and paper), and Anna said, "We played, and I learned how to make an A and a little and big n and little a." She said she wrote her name, and "I played with toys. I shared. I stopped playing with my train and started playing with something else because I thought someone else would want it. So if someone else wants to play with trains, and there's no more trains, they can use that train!"

I congratulated her on sharing and thinking of others. It seems like she had a great day!

A Beautiful Weekend

On Friday after school, we headed up to Murphy, NC, for a wonderful weekend.  I’m glad that we were going to see family, because for me, the first order of business was to get caught up on sleep.  I still haven’t adjusted to Luke’s school schedule.  It’s funny:  I got up at the same time before his school started.  But now, when I get up, I immediately I have work to do getting Luke ready for school.  And Anna has been getting up before Luke and Greg leave, and is uncharacteristically wanting my full attention for most of the day.  Also, the way that Luke’s school schedule is, we no longer have quiet time during the day, so our lives are constantly in motion.  That’s fine, but I didn’t realize how behind on sleep this was putting me.  We arrived in Murphy around 9:00 pm; I went to bed as soon as I could around 10:00, and I slept until noon the next day, getting up only to eat a delicious breakfast around 9:00.  By the time I drug my carcass out of bed at noon, Gigi and Papa had already taken the kids out for a fun day.  They went to the playground, and then had a picnic lunch, and then went to a completely amazing train layout in Blairsville.  They didn’t take pictures, but Papa showed me some magazine articles on it, and it was phenomenal.  The kids had a great time, according to all sources. 

In the meantime, I enjoyed a cup of coffee while watching tv, something that never happens at home.  Then Greg and I got ready and went out on the town ourselves.  First, we went to lunch at a local restaurant called Shoebooties:

Shoebooties is located in Murphy’s little town square, which is actually a pretty cool place.  Afterwards, we walked over to The Daily Grind for another cup of coffee for me (I swear, it’s like I had been drugged), and enjoyed a little shopping.  I really like the eclectic feel of Murphy.  It’s a tiny town, with both a—dare I say—hippie presence

as well as a strong patriotic bent.

I personally enjoy the complexity of those two elements together.  The town definitely has a heartbeat, as my mom would say.  It also has pretty flowers:

and a cool theater:

and mountains:

It was an absolutely gorgeous day, and I loved just taking in the beauty of the area and the personality of the town.  I think the events of late have just made me more appreciative of life’s blessings, and getting to spend time with family in such a unique place is definitely one of them.  From downtown, we went out to Fires Creek park. 

We spent a good amount of time sitting on the rock that’s right in front of Greg, with our feet in the freezing water, talking about love and God and our blessings and our future.

My husband is so silly:

Of course, I then made him take another:

Sitting out there, we also noted the healing power of nature.  God’s beauty is just good for the soul.

After sitting for awhile, we walked on trails like these:

Then we went home to two happy kids building houses out of blocks.  And also, a delicious dinner of grilled hamburgers and baked beans.  Afterward, we all went to the Sweet Tooth:

The kids were in stellar moods:

Sunday was equally gorgeous, and after enjoying worship at church and a delicious lunch out on the breezeway, we headed home.  Thanks, Gigi and Papa, for a wonderful, peaceful, relaxing weekend!

Who They Are Now: Anna

As I type this, Anna is sitting beside me illustrating a book called, Toy Story for Luke. After she illustrates each page, she then dictates the words to me that describe the action. This is just the type of thing that she and I need to do more of. I realized the other day that, even though I do believe I spend as much time with her as I do Luke, we don’t work nearly as much on pre-reading and math skills as I did with Luke. That needs to change.

Even so, Anna can easily say her ABC’s and is good at identifying individual letters and numbers. She also has made great strides in puzzle-working. Her favorite two puzzles are 63-piece Strawberry Shortcake puzzles that her friend, Mary Elizabeth, passed down to her. She loves working them, and she has worked them by herself, but she prefers to have help. We also have little 4-puzzle sets of 12-piece puzzles. She likes to mix all four puzzles up and then work them from there.

Another big step she has taken this year is in her attention span, particularly when it comes to being read to. She used to wander off while I read a book of any real length, but now, she sits patiently while I read several Berenstain Bears books. And those things are not short! One of her favorite things to do while Luke is at school is to bring down big stacks of books to read together on the couch. She never wanders off or gets tired before the entire stack is read.

Like Luke, she also made a lot of progress in swimming. By the end of last summer, she could jump in our neighborhood pool, and swim ten feet to the other steps by herself. Her big problem was that she didn’t know how to come up for air during that process, which, as you might imagine, is fairly essential. It took her a little bit to warm back up to the pool this year, but once Gaga got ahold of her for a week, Anna was doing cannonballs off the diving board (complete with yelling, “Cannonball!”), and swimming to the side while—thank goodness—occasionally coming up for air. I still consider her imminently drownable, mainly because she is a machine in the water, and will NOT stop to catch her breath. But she can swim to the bottom of the shallow end to retrieve things with no goggles, no nose-holding, no problem. She can swim well both above and under water, and she was really great at “saving herself” by swimming to the side and throwing an arm over it.

For all her progress this year, there have been a few regressions. One seems to be in her memory. I have a video from last fall of Anna singing the books of the New Testament, “Jacob Had 12 Mighty Sons,” and the fruit of the Spirit with very little problem. She couldn’t do any of that right now. In fact, a couple months ago, she swore up and down that she had forgotten the words to “Jesus Loves Me,” the very first song she’d ever learned! We had never worked with her on those songs, and she had consistently been going to Sunday school, so I’m just guessing her brain had other things to work on! Even in that memory-less phase, though, little flashes would come out. For example, she has seen Cars exactly one time, well over a year ago. And she has seen Cars 2 exactly one time, over a month ago. Our Cars toys have long been put up in the attic, and we never talk about Cars. However, when we asked her what her favorite character from Cars was, she immediately said, “Fillmore!” Huh? Who’s Fillmore? Oh yeah, the hippie van. Or is it the army truck? Anyway, Anna remembered. She also will occasionally come up and say, “Mama, wasn’t it funny when _______ said, ‘_______’?” I will have no idea what she is talking about, and will finally be able to drag the memory of some piece of dialogue from a months-old story we read from the library. So…obviously, her memory is still there. It is just…otherwise engaged right now:). I do see signs of it coming back to the forefront, though.

Another regression is in *sob!* potty training. From last September to last January, she was completely potty trained. We would often see her hauling it down the hall in the middle of the night to go use the potty, and even if she was really deeply asleep and needing to potty, she would start crying in her sleep, and we would go carry her to the potty. Beginning in January, though, she started having accidents during the day and not seeming the least bit concerned. She was still good at night, which made us think that this was a matter of willfulness. And maybe it was/is, but she has now started wetting her bed at night. We have done everything to halt the backslide, to no avail. It has gotten so bad that Greg actually went and bought a pack of Pull-ups last week, much to Anna’s and my chagrin. But with our house on the market, we really don’t have time to be changing sheets everyday. Anna looked as if we had slapped her when we told her that she had to wear a Pull-up to bed. She was soooo sad and even weepy over it. So we told her that if she was dry in the morning, she wouldn’t have to wear one the next night. So far, her Pull-up wearing has been intermittent, as she has been dry more often than not. Still, it was a hard blow for all of us to go back to Pull-ups. Whenever I put one on her, she walks around funny, saying in her adorable little voice, “The thing is, I just don’t like Pull-ups.” And I say, “The thing is, I don’t either. So don’t pee-pee in them, and we won’t have to wear one tomorrow!”

If I had to sum up Anna’s personality, I would describe it as “passionate.” She is open and affectionate and a champion snuggler. Her love language definitely continues to be “physical touch.” She is also very nurturing and sweet, just by her nature. At the same time, she has some fire in her. Unlike every other member of our family, she is a yeller. Greg and I, we don’t yell. If we want to be punks, we might be bitingly sarcastic or make unpleasant faces, or sigh heavily or roll our eyes. But yelling? Please. We’re not savages:). Anna, on the other hand, considers screaming an essential communication tool to get her point across. And make no mistake: it is a tool that she employs with sound mind and body. She is not generally a fit-pitcher. She does not work herself into an emotional rage. She simply WANTS. LUKE. TO. STOP. DOING. WHAT. HE. IS. DOING! And that’s how she usually yells. We have really made concerted and sustained efforts to squash this practice, as I cannot stand it, and she is definitely getting better.

The good part is that she would much rather laugh than yell, and much rather be happy than upset. When she is making her hilarious “mad face”

the easiest way to defuse it is to make a joke, and more often than not, she will start laughing. This girl loves to laugh. She laughs like it’s her hobby. Sometimes, she is just in the mood to laugh and will request that we show her some of our funny home videos. When we do, she will absolutely howl with laughter. She will laugh like her life depends on it. It’s funny—her laughter in those times will be very genuine and very purposeful all at once. She is very much like her Gaga in that.

Wow, I just keep going. She makes amazing faces (in fact, that might be a future Wordless Wednesday post: the faces of Anna).

She has NO sense of direction. Actually, she does: she as a very keen sense of the opposite of where she should go. It never fails. We are simply going to have to teach her that whatever her instinct is, to turn around 180 degrees, and go that way instead!

She is a shopaholic. I foresee she and Granddad having some marvelous times at the mall. When she and Luke made Build-a-Bears last month, I think she would have bought the whole store if Gaga had let her, particularly when it came to clothes for her bear:

She loves to say, "In fact," to indicate a mind change. Here's an example: "Anna, would you like grapes or applesauce?" "Grapes." "Okay, grapes it is." "In fact...I'd like applesauce." Also, she will occasionally say, "Well, not exactly..." It cracks me up every time.

She always eats her veggies, and is not nearly as picky an eater as Luke is.

She continues to have an amazing imagination.

She continues to be an absolute delight.

Who They Are Now: Luke

I usually do these write-ups in the summer, but they just kept getting put to the back burner.  I didn’t want to skip them all together this year, though, because Luke’s summer has been huge, developmentally speaking.  For one thing, he learned to ride his bike with no training wheels.  Dad still has to give him a little push to get him started, but then he is off!  He is so proud of himself for this accomplishment.  Secondly, he can totally swim now.  He’s made strides each year, but at this point, I no longer consider him an imminent drowning risk.  I still constantly supervise him, of course, but he’s got it, you know?  He can even swim all the way down to the bottom of a 9-foot pool and get one of his toy torpedoes.  He prefers to wear a mask because he doesn’t like to blow out his nose, but he occasionally will swim underwater without one, and without holding his nose.

His third and biggest development is reading.  I don’t know what happened—it’s like a switch flipped—but he is a legit reader now.  He can read beginning reader books like they are nothing.  And he occasionally even reads Anna’s bedtime story to her.  He still doesn’t love to work to hard at sounding things out, but because he reads for comprehension, he’s really good at figuring out the big words through logic.  Of course, this means that he often cuts corners.  For example, one night while reading Anna’s bedtime story, he read “servants” instead of “slaves,” or vice versa.  Those words don’t look alike, but they both start with “s,” and Luke could see that that was where the story was going.  While I’m proud that he is already reading for comprehension, we are definitely going to have to keep working on sounding out the harder words.  Still, I think I am more excited about him learning to read than I was about him taking his first steps.  The first time he read a story to Anna, I cried for joy.  The ability to read just opens the door to sooo much.

He also continues to adjust beautifully to kindergarten.  Simply put, he loves it.  His favorite part is the playground, of course, where he regularly plays tag, freeze tag, Toy Story, and also chases dragonflies with his friends.  One day he did come home miffed that some of the boys playing would call “times” right before he tagged them, so it didn’t count that he tagged them.  Ahh, the old “times” conundrum.  We gave him a few strategies for handling the lameness of “times,” and thankfully, I think the kids moved past it.  Regardless, playground time has continued to be a big success. 

He seems to love his teacher, and he is enraptured by school lunches (he doesn’t always want it, but when he does, he loves it), and pronounced the school pizza to be the best he’s ever had.  He won the “Terrific Turtle” award yesterday for good behavior and got to pick out a prize.  He always has a sticker in his communication folder, which means he stayed on “green” (the good color) all day.  He did absolutely shock me two days ago, though, when he told me that he had to move his clip for talking.  I was floored.  I had already seen that he got a sticker in his folder, but apparently, you get one warning before you move from green.  After some hemming and hawing, he ‘fessed up to talking to his friend, Benjamin, during centers.  I lectured him sternly about how we don’t get our clip moved, but as I thought about it later, I was a little proud.  From all reports, Luke was the eerily silent kid in preschool.  His teacher last year called him “Quiet Luke.”  One day last year, he had a substitute, and when she was passing out lunches three hours into the day, she got to Luke’s lunch and said, “There’s no Luke in this class.”  And Luke still didn’t say anything!  The other kids had to tell the teacher who Luke was.  So…I’m actually pretty happy that he is talking this year.  We just have to remember to talk at appropriate times.

His love for kindergarten coincides beautifully with his current interest in friends.  He has always loved playing with other kids, but these days, he would like someone to come over and play 24/7.  Anytime we tell him that he can do whatever he wants for a special day, he inevitably wants to invite a friend over.  He gets along famously with his friend, Tyler, and his friend, Jonah.  He has a friend, Matthew, at school, who has mentioned wanting to get together for a play date, and Luke is all about it.  Now, I just have to figure out how to contact Matthew’s mom…

For all intents and purposes, he is over Thomas the train.  Thomas, his millions of friends, and his acres of track currently reside in our attic.  Right now, it is all Legos, all the time.  Well, all Legos and Toy Story all the time.  And since most his Legos are Toy Story Legos, he is usually playing with both at once.  I have about decided that he has a decent future as an engineer b/c he is pretty phenomenal at Legos.  He regularly puts together sets that are labeled for ages 7-12, almost completely unassisted.  It’s pretty impressive.  And for someone who doesn’t love to sit and work hard at a thing, he shows remarkable persistence with Legos.  He will sit for an hour putting something together, only to take it all apart 30 minutes later and put it all together again.  The one thing he doesn’t like to do is hunt for pieces.  But lucky for him, I have become an expert piece hunter:).

Even though he is learning to read on his own, Luke still loves to be read to.  For months, we have been reading through the Magic Treehouse series, and are now in the early 20’s of that series.  He really liked it, and it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever read, but then my mom checked out some Nate the Great books…and it was love for both of us.  For one thing, I just love mysteries, and Nate the Great is a detective.  For another thing, those books are funny.  Nate cracks me up, which makes reading them that much enjoyable.

Let’s see, what else?  He likes to play “Cops and Robbers,” or, as he calls it, “Policemen and Criminals.”  He loves to play Lego video games and is actually pretty good at them.  He’s definitely WAY better than his mom, who totally feels old, because the graphics on those games are just overwhelming.  They make me dizzy, and I never have any idea what I’m doing!  Thankfully for him, he inherited his Dad’s video game playing abilities.  Now, if we could only convert that talent into a marketable skill!  He also likes to sing a lot more.  He regularly sings along to our Veggie Tales Sunday school songs cd, which he thinks is hilarious.  (For example, he chortled uncontrollably at the end of “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” when Larry says, “That song always reminds me of slushies.”)  Speaking of funnies, he decided last night that if he had a puppy, he would name him, “Arfbark.”  We loved it.  Greg put it on facebook and got lots of feedback on Luke’s wit.  Let me make clear:  he was not making a play on words with “aardvark.”  He simply thought “Arfbark” was an appropriate name, given that “arf” and “bark” are two sounds that puppies make.

Lastly, Luke is completely cool with the idea of moving soon, and is actually quite excited about it.  I was worried that he would be attached to our house and his room in particular, but no.  He’s ready to go tomorrow.  His adaptability these days has been such a blessing.  In fact, the kid is pretty much a blessing all around.  We sure do love him, and we love watching him blaze a confident trail into his future, via kindergarten, his recent accomplishments, and his excitement about tomorrow.  It’s a lesson that Greg and I could definitely use right about now!