January 15, 2012

• Grant has been a bad sleeper again the past few nights.  The 3 nights previous to last one he woke up for an hour or two each night in the middle.  He'll lie there in bed quietly, and you'd swear he was sleeping, and then he'll bust out saying, 'I love you Mommy!" or "What are you doing, Mommy?"  I love you too, kid, but I'm sleeping, and you should be too.

  This morning he woke up before 5 a.m. and we were up.  We opened the window and looked outside, and then Grant had his version of a conversation with me, I guess.  Some of the things he said were, "Where's Jupiter?" and then, "Jupiter's sleeping?"  Yes, Jupiter's sleeping, and you should be too.  Then he said, "Jesus born!"  I think that came up because looking out the windows reminded him of Christmas lights, and of how they were there to celebrate that Jesus was born.  Then he exclaimed, "One hundred even number!!!"  (He loves to go around and say that 100 is an even number, and that 11 is an odd number.)  Then he asked, "What clock is it now, Mommy?"  So I told him, and then he informed me that, "Madeleine is afraid of ten o'clock."  Yes, yes she is.  Today when it was going to turn 10:00 this morning, Madeleine made herself a little cave out of two laundry baskets pushed together, so that she could hide from ten o'clock.  Grant thinks it's fun to copy Madeleine, and he found a hiding place under the blankets of the bed. 

  Madeleine is obsessed with the clock too.  I think she manages to point out to me every single day each time the clock digits are all the same, which happens at 11:11, 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55.  If you tease her and ask when it's going to be 6:66 she'll laugh at you and say of course you know there is no such time.  She's also afraid of 10:00, but has a mild fascination with the other hours, too.  So she's always doing math, telling you how many minutes it will be until 10:00, or till 1:11, or till any other of her favorite times.  The other day it was 9:42, and she knew it was going to be 18 minutes till 10:00. 

  I've been practicing her letter sounds for taking the dual language program entrance exam.  She's a good reader, but she just knows a lot of words from memory, and from piecing parts of words together.  If she doesn't know a word, she approximates it from her knowledge of other words that look similar, and does a pretty good job of it.  But if you ask her the actual phonetic sounds of individual letters, she doesn't always know.  Or at least not as much as you would expect from a girl who can read as well as she can.  So I guess I'm having my parental moment, trying to get her ready so she can get into the program.  I really want her to be in it, so she'll know Spanish (since I'm bilingual), and also so she'll have a challenge in school.  It'd be tons of fun to go volunteer in her classroom, and the teacher is my aunt's friend, and it'd just be a good thing.  I don't want her not to get in because I was too busy teaching her about planets or prime numbers or things like that, and not enough time teaching her the short i sound. 

  I guess that's enough for now.  I'll try to write a bit more often.  I just seem pretty content with things, and don't feel the need to write down everything they do anymore.  Though I should say today they were being zombies and running around in the dark and eating peoples' brains.  Well, Grant was.  Madeleine was the Yeti Zombie (from Plants vs. Zombies) and she would run away after a short while (as that is what the Yeti Zombie does). 

  • 11:50 pm
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