Faith is growing up! She is 3 1/4 years old now :)
Eating:
Forcing the use of the fork has gone well. She cleans her place after every meal and is very eager to help set the table as well. Continues to ask how everyone's day is going at the table and I love hearing her imitate conversations we have there and her telling us she loves all of us! She is still required to eat 2 bites of everything on her plate and that is usually done without any heartache. Carbohydrates continue to be her favorite food group (who can blame her!).
Sleeping:
This has been our biggest adjustment during this quarter. The week of VBS at our church in June, Faith didn't nap the entire week and to be honest it was a huge stresser for me! After some prayer about it and talking with Frank, I decided that we would start moving to a sleep/rest time. Basically, I put her down at 2:30 and for 45-1hr she has silent rest time, no lights, no toys, just her and her blankie. If she falls asleep during this time, great but if not then I will go in and turn on her nightlight and give her some books and her doll and she can play in her room for the remaining time until 4. If she does fall asleep I still wake her up at 4. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why some days she sleeps and some days she doesn't but she is quiet and respects the silent part of rest time and I am super happy about that. On days she doesn't nap she will usually fall asleep at night in about 30 seconds. On days she does nap, it takes a lot longer than that (like an hour sometimes)! I am sure she is getting herself to the point where she needs 12 hours of sleep total in a 24 hour period.
Play:
Preschool is her favorite playtime activity. I will usually find her at the end of solo play with several dolls sitting on her bed and her reading to them. My in-laws found a Radio Flyer Trike at a garage sale and gave it to Faith. She absolutely loves riding that thing around. She'll put Dolly in the basket in the back and ride for our entire outside time; she loves riding it on walks. It was a great $5! Her other big play love this summer has been the pool. After the first trip during which she was trepidatious at best, she quickly got over any concerns she had about swimming and jumping in by herself. She is a regular water baby and relishes her time in the pool, even our little kiddie pool in the back yard. We have brought the slide over and turned the sprinkler on to make that pool a little more exciting.
Skills / Learning:
Did I mention that Faith loves pre-school. Not only is it her favorite playtime activity, she really really loves doing it together during the day. She knows all of her uppercase and lowercase letters and does really well matching them together. We are starting to work on the sounds each letter makes. Family Fun Night has also been a great addition to our pre-school routine. For the first 2 nights we used the Eeboo Matching Numbers game and not only did she love it, she did remarkably well. Since then I have tried to be a little more creative with Family Fun Night but the games are always good! She is learning her right from her left and that has been fun, especially when my mom taught her that her left hand makes an L!
We are also in the Why? phase. I read a statistic when we were at the Magic House in STL that the average 4 year old asks 437 questions per day. So, the next day I counted and in a 20 minute time period Faith asked upwards of 80 questions. I ask that she be specific with her Why? and not simply leave it has an open ended question. I was kind of hoping that would decrease the number of questions but it hasn't; it has made her think more about her question but the number has not diminished. I suppose that is a good thing. I try very hard to answer the question honestly and not simply give the "just because" answer. I want her to be inquisitive and be full of wonder about the world around her!
Her physical skills are also expanding in addition to her mental. She is doing very well throwing and catching a ball (a large-ish rubber one). She is also learning how to write all of her letters. For her birthday she received the Kumon Write and Wipe uppercase letters and she LOVES working on these.
Faith continues to be a little OCD. She is a huge proponent of reading books based on their order in the stack :) But, she loves to read and ultimatly, I love it!
Our Schedule:
0800 - Wake, breakfast, ready for the day
0900 - Outside
1030 - Preschool
1130 - Sister playtime
1200 - Lunch, chore, playtime with Mama, "work" time with Mama (this is anything I need to do that I normally would have done when she was napping, i.e., cooking, cutting fabric, additional chores)
1430 - Nap / Rest time
1600 - Snack, Training Time, Solo Play
1730 - Freeplay
1800 - Dinner, family time, bath, reading, Bible story, bedtime o/a 2001
No comments:
Post a Comment