Ballet Claire Knows Her Letters

The kids are back in school!

The kids are back in school!

After I dig out of the messy house (No, really...I'm going to get it better!) and keep up with my work stuff (conference call last night from 9:00 - 10:45!) I'm going to try and slowly blog about our fun summer! I told the girls on Sunday night that being a working Mom in the summer is ALWAYS hard, but this was the easiest summer yet! We had a ton of fun stuff for them to be involved in here on the base and, of course, my Mom and Dad being here for a month was both a tremendous help and super fun! It really flew by! However....glad to have a routine again!!!

I'm going to start with the most recent event!  Sweet Claire had her first ballet class yesterday. She was on a "basketball team" last year, but this is her first activity other than that. My friend Danielle Caceres offered to take Claire along with her daughter Lala. Having four kids has taught me to say "Yes, thank you so much" when people offer to help!  THANK YOU DANIELLE!

Danielle is a professional photographer, so that is an added benefit of having her as Claire's taxi driver! :)

Striking a pose!

Cute girls, ready for their first class!!!

I also took Claire to her four year "well child" visit yesterday ("just" 3 months late) and the doctor asked her to draw a picture of herself. Dr Perry was quite amazed at the detail and said that with all of the detail (hands, mouth, hair, ears, eyelashes, etc) she would have thought a six year old drew it. Way to go Claire! 

I love her people that she draws (Taught at Yochien) and asked her to draw me a few this morning to share with you because the one she drew at the doctor's office was on the sheet covering the table. :)

The bottom right is an alien. She asked me, while she was drawing it, "Do aliens have three legs?" How does she know what an alien is anyway? Then she drew me and then Gigi. ("Does this look like baby hair?") She then drew a capital "G" and a small "i" and then was quite distressed because she couldn't remember how to draw a small "g". I told her to go ahead and draw a big one, but she didn't want to, so I showed her how on another sheet of paper and she quite happily made a c and then the line and the loop. :) 

I started doing a "Hooked on Phonics" workbook with her because we're planning on keeping her at Yochien through kindergarten. She will "graduate" from Japanese kindergarten in March 2013 and we'll enroll her in American kindergarten for the last two months of the school year. I can't very well expect her to learn EVERYTHING from Nick Jr and she is such a joy to spend time with, so it's a win-win! She loves the one on one attention and asks "Mommy, can we go and learn how to read?" almost every day. She's such a sponge.  (At the well visit, the doctor asked if she could count to 10 and I said, "Yes, in three languages." Thank you Nick Jr and Yochien for two of the three!)

We're a big fan of Kumon (where Olivia took Math and Japanese this summer and Audrey has been and is continuing to take Japanese since May), so I looked online to see if they had any Kumon workbooks. I ordered a few of those, but our favorite purchase from that order were the Kumon Dry Erase Flash Cards (Uppercase Letters). Claire asks for these almost every day as well and will sit and trace each letter of the alphabet from A to Z and then will carefully erase them from Z to A. It's good quiet time and as long as she enjoys it, we'll keep doing it. I just ordered some number ones and shape ones too. I like having her at the kitchen table doing that while I'm cooking dinner.

So, that's way more detail than anyone but a Grand (pa/ma/aunt) is probably interested in, but I wanted to get it down "on paper" to tell my sweet Claire in the future that we knew when you were four that you were so smart and were going to be a great student!

Love you Claire!!!!!!