Ellen update

And, on to the older child. To hear her description, life can often be a hardship in our house because no one talks nice to her, or cares when she is sick, or plays with her. It's really rather sad. (I hope you can sense my sarcasm).

Ellen has fortunately remained relatively unscathed in the sickness department (*knocking on wood so hard*) and has been going to school and keeping herself pretty busy at home with Rainbow Loom and lots of coloring and art "projects". She went through a snowflake phase in which no piece of paper was safe from her scissors and had a literal MOUNTAIN of paper snowflakes on her desk.

We've been reading some of her new chapter books from Christmas and she loves Roald Dahl just as I did (and DO). Santa also brought her a daily child's journal. It goes for 3 years and there is a prompt for each day of the year and you can write a little paragraph on each page, then next year we will go back and do the same thing, answering the same questions on the same pages. We've kept up with it pretty well, so far, and as you might imagine, it's pretty hilarious.

She is also starting to read more herself. She is really bright and generally game for trying new things and I can tell really loves to feel accomplished, but for some reason, she and I really haven't been able to work on early reading together. She gets very frustrated and I just decided not to push it all. We have the BOB books and she has lots of things to practice letters and she loves writing letters and asking how to spell things. Aunt Betsy and I finally convinced her that it would be nice if she had some practice reading before she started Kindergarten because she would be learning so many new things. She has dug in a bit and really likes to practice with her mouse on my computer doing reading activities, so I think we are making some progress there.

She continues to scrounge for coins every chance she can get and has quite a heavy savings jar for her big girl bike come spring. We need to start shopping - suggestions welcome!

We had a little outing to the Nelson for a photo shoot and got to see a few of Ellen's favorites, namely the mummy and sarcophagus and the Chinese bed (and also made time for silliness):

And, the rest of the time seems to have been spent related to mess and snow!