Mel’s Mundane Meanderings

I’ve been really bad at updating this blog with my kids’ milestones and anecdotes from their lives. I’ve been even worse keeping a written record, as in their “baby books.”

So, here goes:

Mikaela is almost 4. She’ll be 4 in just a little over a month. She can write her name legibly, she knows all the letters of the alphabet and their letter sounds (both upper and lower case). We’re still working on short and long vowels, though. She is learning sight words and we’re working through How To Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. She’s doing pretty well. She can almost count to 20, although she tends to get confused sometimes between 13-18. I know, we need to work on that. She can cut with scissors and glue with a glue stick, but is still working on it. She knows her colors and shapes. Her deductive reasoning is getting better by the day; she’s also pretty good at answering questions about a book I just read.

Mikaela loves to sing. She also LOVES to dress up in her dress-up clothes. She changes clothes and shoes all day long. When she plays with her dolls or stuffed animals, she “talks” for them in a sweet high-pitched voice. She likes to watch movies and TV, but I’m only letting her watch a little bit each day. She really likes shows that are “live action” as opposed to animated or with puppets – like Drake and Josh, iCarly and Full House.

Gabriel is doing well at 5 years and 3 months. His speech is still choppy and full of mispronunciations, but he almost always gets his point across now. There’s very little that we don’t understand. Other people can’t always understand him, though.

He adores building intricate cities using blocks, action figures and his Geo Trax trains and other various toys. I mean, he could seriously spend hours in one sitting getting it just right. He comes unglued when Mikaela knocks anything down. He also loves playing with his action figures and will mix them up – Darth Vader might be fighting Buzz from Toy Story, for example. He also enjoys movies, but always asks “is there a bad guy in it?” – meaning, he likes the action movies. Especially Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. Academically, he’s doing pretty much everything Mikaela is, although we need to work on his lower-case letters. He still has trouble gripping a pencil and scissors properly, but he works at it.

The kids play cooperatively pretty darn well these days. Oh, the imaginations they have. It’s fun to watch and listen to. They build cities together, using her toys and his. They play “birthday party,” which involves one of them standing outside the door to their room and saying “ding-ding” as if they were ringing a doorbell – and the other one opens the door and says, “surprise! Here’s your presents!” – to which the other says, “oh, wow!” … They play Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I haven’t really figured out, but I know it involves a lot of running back and forth from his room to her room and a lot of costume changes for Mikaela. They play “knight and princess,” where they both dress up in their respective costumes and he chases her around, screaming. (Someone needs to tell him the knight RESCUES the princess.) They also play “monsters” which also involves a lot of running around and screaming. They play hide-and-”sink” (which I always call to them: “SEEK, it’s SEEK not sink!”), where one counts and the other stays hidden for about 30 seconds before coming out and revealing themselves, giggling. They also play a lot with Mikaela’s dolls, pretending to teach them in school, go to the doctor, or the grocery store. They also play a lot with Mikaela’s plastic food, setting up grand feasts.

At 5, Gabriel is average in height but skinny. He wears size 5 pants with a belt, but he could stand to go up to a 6. Gotta get that boy to gain some weight, though. He is still pretty darn picky, although he will generally try something new these days, instead of pitching a temper tantrum about it.

At almost-4, Mikaela is still teeny. She wears a 3T shirt and is in some strange limbo-world of a pants size. She has really outgrown her 2T pants, but is too skinny and short for her 3T pants. I wish there was a half-size in there somewhere. At her last doctor’s visit, she’s still under 30 pounds… but she’s so short, she is proportional. I’m pretty sure this kid’s not going to see 5 feet.

Two skinny kids … goodness, you wouldn’t believe how much they eat in a day. Mikaela says she’s hungry about every 2 hours. She’s a grazer. Gabriel will eat fairly large quantities of what he likes, but will not eat much at all if he doesn’t like it. I only wished he liked healthier stuff. :/

My kids love building things, especially Gabriel. They set up elaborate “cities” with blocks, hot wheels cars, all kinds of action figures and animals, Gabriel’s GeoTrax trains and whatever else is handy. I took these yesterday. I think Gabriel did most of the building:

In this last one, this is what happens when a boy and girl play together. This is the Indiana Jones German soldiers’ jeep, being driven by Hello Kitty. It appears that Hello Kitty is a bad driver – it looks like she stomped on the brakes and all the my little ponies went flying.