Six

D. turned six years old on December 13! December 13 was a Friday. She took carrot muffins to school to celebrate. For supper she chose fries, chicken nuggets, broccoli, and chocolate cake. We gave her her birthday presents from us: 2 books (one French, one English) and a Playmobil set (set 4015, to be exact).

On Saturday she had a birthday party with 3 friends from school. They had mini-pizzas, cheesies, and broccoli for lunch and decorated cupcakes for dessert. There was one nose-head collision involving many tears and a little blood - but other than that, it went well! The friends were quite enamoured with her bunkbed. They did a lot of climbing up and down often without making use of the actual bunkbed ladder!

D had talked about having a pinata and playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey but when it came time to go to the store for supplies for those activities, she desisted. Her Papa and I had googled something like "DIY kids birthday party" a couple days beforehand. The only idea we followed up on was this:

We had scheduled a birthday lunch with extended family for the following day (Sunday) but a snowstorm forced us to cancel. We've rescheduled for this Sunday which means more party guests: her grandparents and uncle will have arrived for Christmas holidays. Hooray!

We had another snowstorm today. All the district schools were closed so D. experienced her first SNOWDAY. She was pleased to enjoy some hot chocolate at a local café:

She also came to my office for a while in the afternoon. She watched the Lorax and did some drawing at my desk while I finished up some work. I was thinking about her experiencing things that I experienced as a child: waking up excitedly wondering if school would be cancelled, for instance. I also remember my dad bringing my brother and I in to his office, which was also at a post-secondary institution. I've been thinking about this generally since we moved here because we often go to my grandparents' place for Sunday dinner, like my family did when I was D's age. There is something precious about these repetitions.

Verbalness

Even as we're following up on a recommendation that A see a speech therapist, his vocabulary has expanded a lot this fall. Here are a few notes on recent developments:

He has started to talk about himself in the first person. Two examples: (1) At a special town event on Friday after we had had a horse-and-wagon ride through downtown, he said, "I like it horsie!" (2) When he feels like his mittens are askew or his boots are falling off, he says, "My mitten!" or "My boot." But he has an adorable pause between each word, more accurately transcribed as: "My. Mitten!"(Sidenote: look what happens if you google the word "askew"!)

He has always called his sister... oh man, I don't know what letters to put together to replicate this sound! It's something like if you isolate just the "an" syllable in "angela" or "anger." Anyhow, now he has started to call her, appropriately, "Dorty." (I'm thinking about how when SHE was little, she used to call herself "Da-ta.")

He has this awesome word that is a combination of because + pourquoi + parce que. It sounds like "Percuz."

He used to called peanut butter "dap." Now he says something like "peanut butter" but it sounds like "papa pillow."

He's got "Merry Christmas" down pat.

Obviously his sister WHO IS ABOUT TO TURN 6 (!!) is incredibly articulate. But we can still notice her learning new words. Earlier this fall she was really into inserting the word "technically" into her sentences. And one thing that I've noticed about her speech is she overuses the verb "grab." I find this very endearing. I'm not sure where it comes from; it might be related to the use of "prendre" in French. As an example: she'll talk about something "grabbing a lot of time" instead of "taking a lot of time."