Parent-Teachers Conference

Today, Tom and I went to our first parent-teacher conference and we couldn't have been prouder. We already had noticed great things at home, but were happy to hear that Mrs. Klein also felt Karina was progressing nicely. She is well-liked by her two teachers, "popular" with the other kids and happy. One comment was about needing to remind Karina to walk through the classroom as she tends to dance her way across the room. We both smiled and said, "That sounds like Karina!"

After the conference we took Karina for her first cup of "coffee" (actually hot chocolate of which she drank two sips)

Mommy's so proud of Karina!

Karina recently has shown maturation and growth in a number of ways, all of which seem to be an effect of being in school. She's learned how to hop, although she stays in one place and so far can't move forward. She can now put on her own coat...they taught her the lay-it-on-the-floor-upside-down technique where she puts her hands in the flat upside-down coat and flips it over her head. She can button her clothes...which is most exciting to Karina because she can button her pajamas, although ironically I think they were working on buttoning especially hard with her so she could button her jacket before going outside and she still can't button that coat because the fleece is so thick around the buttonhole she can't grab the button. It is absolutely precious to watch her work so hard on her pajama buttons. She really focuses hard and will work on it until all three buttons are buttoned, which can take a few minutes time. This is significant for her given she doesn't have a history of showing great patience for lengthy tasks. I think the difference is that she knows she can do it and this makes it much easier to keep at it because she knows she'll be successful...she's not as patient when she's practicing a new task she hasn't yet mastered.

She's been more independent with singing the alphabet song. Although she's been singing it as a duet with me for a long time, she wasn't able to sing it all the way through on her own always getting stuck after, "...L, M, N, O, P..." So I began prompting her with, "...Q, R, S..." and then each time she'd sing it again later I'd sing the same prompt until she began singing it on her own. Then she got stuck at "...S..." So I did the same thing with, "...T, U, V..." until she sang it on her own and got stuck at "...V..." After she made it all the way to Z, she still didn't quite know the ditty at the end, but she improvised and for a few days sang, "...W, X, Y and Z...now I know my alphabet you...now I know my alphabet you." After which we'd both laugh because she knew it wasn't quite right and she knew it made me laugh! A week or so later she began singing even the end perfectly.

At home, she's learned a few things, too. By pure necessity to protect Tommy's expected life span, I taught Karina how to safely lay down Tommy from a sitting position, after observing her for the second or third time "take him down" like a wrestling move, insisting that she shouldn't be scolded because, "Mom, he wanted to lay down!" When I realized that the punishment was not proving to be a deterrent, I decided I could either intensify the punishment (never fun for Mom or Kid) or teach her how to do it safely, which seemed the better idea since she would likely need to learn to do it someday anyway. Happily, she got the technique down after only one or two slightly rough landings for Tommy's big melon head. Now she'll show visitors how to safely lay down Tommy...or her teddy bear or her dolly or whatever stuffed animal is near by. Once she even tried to lay down Bart, but as you can imagine that didn't work terribly well!

She's also done a few thing recently that just make us shake our heads and say, "I can't believe what I big girl she is!" She insisted upon helping me mow the lawn, just like the story of Uncle Quentin as a much littler kid than Karina, by holding onto the lower handle bar. But unlike Uncle Quentin, Karina is so tall she wanted to hold the top with me, and the only way we could move forward was if we each held on one side while I tried to push from one side. It worked okay although we weren't able to go very fast and I did lose her once completely when she was thrown off like a "crack the whip" game when I turned a corner too quickly! Oops...she was fine! After having her finger and toenails painted by me a few times over the summer, Karina painted her own nails today, with a little help from me to get a manageable amount of nail polish on the brush.

Karina's also taken to changing her own clothes randomly in the middle of the day as we've been generally working on dressing and undressing. She seems to have developed her own sense of style (luckily usually pretty good) and a quite mature attitude as exemplified by one day after we'd already been out once, but she'd changed her clothes and we were going out again. We asked her to get on her shoes and gave her the pair she'd worn earlier when she said, "No Mom, I can't wear those shoes." And when I asked why, she emphatically answered, "Because I already wore them once today!"

But just in case we begin to forget that she's still a little girl, she reminds us with the cutest of language errors. We go to a restaurant called "Bella's" and Karina loves to go there and asks if we can go. But for some reason, she has a mental block when it comes to saying the name. It makes no logical sense. She doesn't have trouble saying "B's," the word "bell" or even the name "Belle," when refering her cousin Elsa's dog, but for some strange reason she can only call the restaurant, "Fella's." We have corrected her dozens of times without success. We have practiced saying, "Belle, Belle, Belle...like Elsa's doggie, right?" We'll say, "Karina say 'Buh...Buh...Buh...Bella's'" to which Karina will repeat, "B...B...B...Fella's!" It is mind boggling how she is unable to say the name of that restaurant!

Another adorable mistake was when she was answering my question after I heard her pass some gas. I asked her about it as I have before just to help prompt her to think about the connection of the two, saying,"Karina, do you have to go potty?" To which she answered adorably, "No, that's just my gasoline!" I repeated it as a question, "Just my gasoline?" and we both laughed as she said, "No, that's not right!" as we laughed some more!