2 weeks ago:
Lorelei come too?
Mommy give Lorelei a hug
Now:
(looking in the mirror) That’s ME
I like blue
Me: are you still eating your food? Her: I am.
We’ve entered the 1st person! It’s a huge linguistic and developmental milestone. She sounds much less like a baby and more like a tiny person with a pathetic vocabulary and a terrible speech impediment. We’re focusing on specific sounds to help us understand her more. So tootie and rattoon will become cookie and raccoon. Though we think rattoon is SO darling it will probably become family lexicon.
Did you know that Moriarty can read? I know I’ve been saying that for months, but this week he and I have done night reading where I do about half the sentences, and he does about half. He’s sounding out 2 and 3-syllable words. I’m so proud of his persistence; it takes a long time to give up and I have to stop myself from just telling him the answer. There are some gaps that will come this year in 1st grade. More practice with double vowels, silent ‘e’, etc. But the more we practice the better he gets. We had a family field trip to the library and found early readers with his favorite thing in the world, firetrucks, and some with Paw Patrol. Lorelei had never been to the library and was very excited by all the books and the art on the walls.
Lorelei will be going to the Montessori preschool the kids were in before Covid lockdown. She’ll be in the pre-Montessori classroom for about a year until she’s old enough to graduate to the big kid class. Moriarty starts first grade at our neighborhood elementary school. Of course I have deep anxiety about them being out during the Delta upswing, but I still believe Moriarty can’t tolerate another year home. He’s been doing so much better since starting counseling, but we also ramped up his social time with friends and cousins on the weekend so I’m a bad parent scientist. I think both are helping. But school seems like a critical thing for him. Moriarty’s school orientation (zoom) was this week and I’m so impressed at the wokeness. The counselor advocates and leads meditation and calming exercises. They understand that apologizing isn’t as effective as amends so that’s what they expect, and they do ongoing social-emotional learning as part of their curriculum.
Moriarty has been given the chore of collecting the chickens’ eggs every morning and letting them out of their coop, into the fenced run. He takes it very seriously. We created a big chart on the whiteboard where he tracks the date and which color eggs he finds. I decided that eggs our chickens lay are ‘lafleggs’ so now at breakfast I make scrambled lafleggs for us all, which both kids think is SO cool. We baked muffins with the lafleggs and I have decided this will be called lafluffins. We shared with the cousins last weekend. It just feels so special to have a mini farm and eat off our property (I mean beyond the garden vegetables, wild strawberries, backyard apple pie, and front yard blackberry pie…) OMG we’re homesteaders!
Quotes of the month:
Moriarty is bothering Lorelei and she’s frustrated. Debbie asked her, “is Moriarty the boss of you?” Lorelei replied, “yes” in a very distressed voice.
Lorelei is obsessed with hiding binkies in my pocket and other places. She told me “close the binkies in my shirt. haha that’s funny”.
Moriarty was outside and needed to pee. He told me in a curious voice, “even though my pee is a liquid the moss won’t suck it up”.
Fun videos:
Lorelei bouncing on ball on trampoline
Latest photos are here, password ‘mal’