What Do You Noe?

Clara asking how to spell cat, prompted Joe to write the sentence above on the magna doodle board.  You can see the phonetic spelling he is learning about in kindergarten on display with "noe" standing in for know, and "spel" for spell.  Do, you, how, to, and the are all sight words that he knows.  Cat is missing its final letter because Our Hero got sort of excited about the sentence he'd written all by himself.

It's really something to watch him figure things out on his own, which he is more apt to do if an adult isn't there to tell him the correct way to spell a word or explain a concept that he has some familiarity with, but doesn't know inside and out.  At such times, he just powers through with what he's got.  Like this morning, Julie took Joe to buy some donuts while Ted and Birdie slept in a bit.  Joe had gotten up first, and was in his room busily filling out pages in his All About Me book, which he then wanted to take with him.  That's how Julie and Joe ended up discussing how many clocks were in the house in the Byerly's parking lot.  Julie didn't say much other than to take it room by room.  It wasn't long before Joe said that there was one for sure on "that thing up high that we cook in sometimes and goes round and round": the microwave.  We don't use it often enough to say the word very often, but he knew just how to describe it!

Coloring Cats

When Julie arrives to pick up Clara, she will often find Birdie tracing shapes with stencils and then coloring in those forms.  She's fairly good at not moving the stencil as she traces the shape, and she's even better at coloring in the lines.  This picture is from a few nights ago when Clara had just finished tracing the outline of the cat when Julie arrived, so Clara brought her paper home to color the cat in there. You can see that she tried writing cat at the top of the paper with the balloon-like lowercase A.  (The picture of the cat off to the left was given to Birdie by Joe's friend Eliot.)

Pig Crazy (Hog Wild?)

We went to see Charlotte's Web* at the Minneapolis Children's Theater not long before we went to Des Moines over Joe's (and thus Clara's) fall break.  We have the movie as well.  Although Joe is frightened by the beginning of both Finding Nemo and Ice Age, he is nonplussed by just where Papa might be going with that ax.  Thus, he and Birdie are big fans of all things Charlotte's Web and, in particular, pigs.  In Birdie's case, it is an obvious plus that pigs are pink.  She got a small plush pig when we were in Iowa whom she christened Wilbur.  She and Joe are both fond of building zoos, cages, and pens of all stripes for various of the members of their stuffed menageries.  Clara recently built Wilbur (who is a girl, by the way) a pen out of a box in which a pair of shoes Julie had ordered were delivered.

Not long after Wilbur's arrival, Clara's class began a unit about farms.  Julie usually wanders about Birdie's room at pick-up while Birdie gets into her coat and other winter gear.  Even before she flipped the picture above over to read the name on the back, Julie just knew it was Birdie's: he animal selected as a favorite was a pig, and the pig was being penned up--with grass.  You can't be too careful with pigs.

*Thank you again Grandma Connie and Grandpa Charles!

Usually, Birdie does a better job of getting the letters in her name in the right order, and doesn't bother with an uppercase L when the lowercase L is, frankly, easier, but this is still a pretty classic representation of her "signature" right now: she makes her Cs in two strokes (here, three), starting with the middle and adding a curve at the top, and her lowercase As look like balloons.

Yogi Bambini

When weather, light, and internal motivation permit, Julie goes running outside.  When the weather or the light force Julie inside, she usually exercises after the bambini have gone to bed.  But today, she exercised in the morning.  She'd no more gotten downstairs than Birdie came padding down the stairs.  Not long after, Joe (and Ted) arrived. For a while, Julie was moving to a Tracy Anderson DVD, and the bambini just stared and took that all in. (Who can blame them? Even beginner Tracy is hard.) But when Julie moved on to some yoga, Joe and Clara apparently decided this was an exercise regime they could get on board with, and sidled right up to her, Joe on her left, and Clara on her right.  You can see a short clip of the yogis at work here.  After they'd wrapped the session and had breakfast, Julie was upstairs brushing her teeth, when Joe appeared at the bathroom door asking if he could take out the mat.  Julie said yes, and when's she came downstairs again, found Joe doing the whole practice again (some of which you can see here)!  Namaste, Fans.

Fall Party

This Saturday we had our first party, and it was a rager!  We hosted Eli, Emma, Austin, Avery and their respective handlers. It was a warm early evening so the kids all played in the backyard while the adults relaxed inside. It wasn't long before we looked out the window to see Joe and Austin climbing the lilac tree, which is a little unsetteling when your son has never done that before. It was soon getting dark so the kid party moved inside to the basement where toys were strewn about and Joe and Austin tried sliding down the carpeted steps head first (which Left Joe still sporting a rug burn on his chest). They somehow all managed to sit down for about five minutes to eat before continuing their basement adventures. The girls were soon upstairs pretending they were princesses and in general avoiding those crazy boys. When it was time to go we said goodnight to our friends who all live close enough to walk home which was an extra perk of the party!