On Thursday night Amy has piano lessons and on Friday after school both girls are in a Chess Club. The people that we carpool with were signing their boys up for the class. They said they would still pick up Amy and Misha at the usual 3 pm time if the girls weren’t interested in learning Chess. I thought it would be a good opportunity for them to learn and to have some “brain” activity. It’s not such a big deal in my schedule on Fridays, they just don’t get home until after 4. They both are enjoying the challenge…and again, it was $10 each for the entire school year. You just can’t beat the price.
Kristen’s activities include story time at the library at 10:30 am on Thursday with Miss Jan. She loves it. I think she might even be ready to move up to the next class which meets instead on Monday mornings. In September, she, too, will begin swimming lessons. She really improved over the summer in overcoming her fear of the water. This will be a good start for her.
Kristen graduated to a “big girl” bed at the beginning of September. I figured since she wasn’t keen on the potty training, I’d mess up her schedule in another way. She watched as I took down her crib and tried to help me. She had a nap no problem in her bed that first afternoon, and I thought to myself, “Piece of cake!” Not so. That night she realized that she could actually get out of bed and come out of her room. She did that a couple of times throughout the night, and I lamented, “What have I done?” Chris looked at me with that “You just had to go a mess up a good thing” look. She got better with the passing nights and finally was back to sleeping through the night.
What got her in to more trouble though was not taking a nap one day. I’d put her down and she was right back up playing and coming out of her room. Chris even went in a couple of times. No luck. I finally gave up and put her in front of the tv. I checked on her a couple of times and finally she gave in to the dreaded nap monster and zonked out on the floor. By then it was 3 pm and I didn’t want her sleeping long. I transferred her upstairs to her bed but left the door ajar. That night after work, Chris purchased a new round door knob from Home Depot. We have lever knobs that are pretty easy for little hands to open. Just in case she was also adept at opening the round knob, we added a child safety knob on top. Now she’s back to sleeping through her naps and knocks on the door when she is ready to come out. It effectively psyched her into staying in bed.
I figured Kristen was ready for some of these changes in her life when she began to assert more independence and growing up attitudes. I wasn’t sad at all to say good bye to the high chair. It had sat in the corner of the breakfast nook for the past two years, and I was just waiting for the day when I could put it away. Kristen decided that she wanted to sit up at the counter as her sisters do. She requires a shorter stool to climb up to her counter-height stool and can barely see food in a bowl, but she is adamant about sitting up there.
Her speech is coming along, but it is not stellar by any means. She is picking up new words but can only say a few of the alphabet sounds. It’ll come. On the flip side of her brain, she has decided that she needs to walk down the stairs without holding on to the wall or the railing. When I attempted to potty train Kristen however, I would let her watch “The Letter Factory” video by Leap Frog that teaches the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes. So now she recognizes most of her letters by the sounds that they make and can pick them out on the computer keyboard.
Grandma Ball sent all of the girls new, monogrammed lunch boxes just for fun. Kristen calls hers a backpack (like Dora). She often enjoys riding to school with the girls in the morning and makes sure that she has her hat, shoes and little pink lunch box in hand to be ready. So cute.
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