child number one

*sigh*
kind of quiet tonight... Ryan's off playing two rounds of soccer tonight, my house is clean, my laundry's done, there's nothing on tv, my google reader has been empty all afternoon, and I'm bored. So I guess I'll blog.

Like I said before, it's been awhile since I've shared any specifics on the kids -other than about them getting up too early and their too much fighting and making too many messes and generally driving me crazy. So I should probably mention some of the good stuff too!

How about a little Savannah debriefing?

It just blows my mind that my little girl will be five years old in just over three months. Yes, three months is a ways away, but it scares me because we all know how fast it'll really go. Then it'll only be four months 'till kindergarten. Can't even think about that!
Anyway.
It's not just the numbers and dates that blow me away; I can turn a blind eye to the calendar and still freak out at how she's growing and changing. So often I look at her these days and I can't even see a glimpse of the little toddler she used to be. She's thin and tall and her limbs are getting that long and lanky look instead of the chubby dimpled elbows and knees she used to have. Her face is strangely thin and her neck is long and I watch her every day leave behind just a little more cuteness and become more and more beautiful. It's going too fast.
And she's reading, people! I'm not ready to have a kid that can read. She's honestly caught us spelling things out now. She's acquired a pretty good collection of sight words and she can sound out so many more it's crazy. And she is trying more and more writing on her own as well, with the fun simple phonetic writing kids do at the start. Sometimes it's a challenge to crack her "code" and read what she's trying to write, but it's so fun to see her try! She even has a pen pal. Kristyn, a fellow blogger, has a daughter and came up with the idea of having the girls send pictures and cards to each other since they were so close in age, and Savannah was thrilled! She's constantly drawing or writing something and now it's always for Cloey! She did this one the other day...


Noel Cloey
I love u do u love me
Savannah








Which reminds me... I owe Cloey a little package. We haven't sent any mail out in awhile!!







Here's another picture I found awhile ago that just cracked me up... notice her peoples' conversation... written in mirror image when he "talks back to her". Did I mention she was big on the Noel?







Another interesting note... now that she's writing all the time, her drawings have become super simple again. Her people were so detailed before, and now they're back to pretty plain people... like she doesn't have time for all that extra frivolous drawing... must write!!

Savannah's loving school and the music class they have on Thursdays. She's also still super excited each week about her dance classes. She's now suddenly decided she wants to be a ballerina ice skater and she asks me almost every day if we can go ice skating. Sadly, we can't, as I'm horrible on the ice and there's no way I could take her out. So she then tells me she wants to take lessons. haha!
She's also been bugging me, begging me really, for piano lessons. I put an ad out on Craigslist for piano teachers since I had a hard time finding many private ones, and most don't take students this young. I got quite a few replies to my ad though, so we may follow up on that one. I wish I was confident enough to teach her myself, I just wouldn't even know where to start.

SJ's totally into games right now and asks for willing players all throughout the day. Her favorites right now are Sequence for kids, Crazy 8's, Bingo, and really whatever she can get anyone to play with her. She even settles for Sawyer playing when Ryan and I are busy, although we can all guess how well that usually works out...

The other thing I've been loving with her lately is that almost every night she asks, "Mom, can I tuck Sawyer into bed tonight?" And she takes care of the whole thing. She helps him brush his teeth, she gets him all tucked into his bed, she lays with him and reads a couple of books to him and the she snuggles up to him, asking him what his favorite part of the day was, helps him come up with an answer, and says prayers with him (complete with Jesus, please help Sawyer sleep good all night, and stay in bed all the way till morning).
Then she gives him a kiss on the forehead, and says the same thing every night; "goodnight little buddy, I love you, see you in the morning" and turns off the light on her way out of the room. I just sit by in the rocking chair, soaking it all in... I just melt every time I watch this all. I love it.






Savannah is all about her friends, and I've decided that I need to work on facilitating that a little better. She always wants to play with the girls in the neighborhood, and we do do that quite often, but I need to take advantage of that even more I think. And there are a couple of girls from her preschool class that she talks about a lot; talk about having them over to play or going out to lunch with them. I need to jump on that and make an effort to help her make those things happen. It's just a little too easy to brush it off... she asks so vaguely, "Can we have H come over sometime to play?" and it's so easy for me to just say "sure, someday we'll do that" and never really make it happen. I wish we had a class list of email or phone numbers like they did last year. I feel like I never see the other moms. I'll have to talk to the teacher about how best to go about that.

So that's probably enough about Savannah already. If you're still reading along, you get a gold star! I just wanted to make sure I wrote some of this stuff down so I don't forget. And it's nice to sit and reflect on more of the good and fun stuff, the things that remind me I'm so blessed to have this little girl and that I'm blessed to have these years with her. Savannah Joy.

Oh! That's one other thing! She is obsessed with her middle name! For the past month, all of the Christmas stuff out and around that says Joy... I think she pointed out every single sighting of the word Joy in this whole city this holiday season. I think she thinks she's pretty hot stuff to have a whole holiday do so much celebrating of this one little word that happens to belong to her. She got a Christmas shirt that says Joy and with it she wears a necklace she has that says Savannah, and when she wears them she points out to everyone she sees, "did you know this is my name? You just read, 'Savannah' and then 'Joy'... Savannah Joy! That's me!"