Spatial awareness

For Father's Day, Ryanne decided that Chrys wanted Legos. He hasn't played with any Legos in quite some time. She got him a fire boat that floats and has an engine that can be submerged in water. It's all about the cool and unique parts for him so she picked well. They spent Corin's naptime putting it together. Well, Chrys laid out pieces and helped and Ryanne assembled.

She did phenomenally. She needs very little guidance on the simple sets.

I got another one for her at Target on Sunday. It's a fire truck from the City series. I think it and the boat are part of the same set, but I haven't looked it up. We've been working on it for two sessions now (nap and bed time for Corin since he likes to eat pieces).

She's putting it together with only a suggestion or two from me. This is not an easy task. I still struggle with spatial issues to this day so the fact that she can conquer this at 4.5 is amazing to me. She doesn't get frustrated. She studies the picture until it makes sense. She's learning to do the piece closer to her and then match the other side if it's a mirror thing. I am in awe.

I guess I'll be keeping an eye out for more of the younger age Lego sets. She seems great with the 5 and up sets right now. I haven't tried 6 or 7 and probably won't rush it.

Lost in translation...

We got Ryanne the books Pinkalicious and Purplicious.

She likes Pinkalicious. We've talked about how important it is to vary your diet, how you can't eat just one thing, etc. She's got it.

Purplicious, on the other hand, seems to have missed its mark. It talks about how all the other "big" kids liked black and Pinkalicious tried to fit in, but then discovered that she could still like pink because it was special. We loved that it talked about maintaining self-identity. She talked about how much she loved pink.

Now her favorite color is black. Pink is apparently for babies.

Through Ryanne's eyes

For Christmas, Ryanne got a digital camera. It's nothing fancy, but she asked for a camera that takes real pictures and this one does. She loves it. It eats batteries so I'm not totally in love, but it's fun to see what she likes to look at.

Thanks to the love that is iLife '08, I can now share them with you...

Here are her recent shots. I think some of them are actually by daddy, but they were on her camera.

Observations on independence

Ryanne's use of description for words she doesn't know absolutely amazes me. Last night she declared that she saw "the guacamole seeds in the guacamole wrappers." We had avocados. I guess she doesn't eat them plain all that often...

She is also becoming very good at asking for help. At Christmas, she asked someone to help her find Christmas wrapping paper, but she didn't know wrapping paper so she asked for something about the paper that you use to hide presents and the lady figured it out and helped her. Then she went to check out, even though I told her I wasn't ready. It was amusing.

Another store trip, I forgot to get wipes for Corin. I mentioned it and, without asking, she took off looking for them. Turns out, she didn't quite remember, but knew to find someone in a green apron (we were at Whole Foods which is pretty small so I wasn't too worried about her wandering off) and ask for help. She did and he walked her to the wipes and then back to me.

She orders her own food at restaurants and, now, gets pretty upset if someone asks me what she wants. She'll be ready for college next week.

Ladies and Gentlemen...

We have a reader!

Today at Costco, we looked through the books. They happened to have collections of the BOB series from Scholastic for a ridiculously low price. I bought the first boxed set.

Tonight, we opened it up. Ryanne read the first two books and part of the second one to me. By the time we read them to daddy the second time, she was using the picture clues with the words to read instead of having to sound things out.

The third book presented some problems. She didn't know the word rag. She had some trouble with the "r" sound - she wanted to put h in front of it.

Nevertheless...She read! Two books. Simple books, but ... holy crap. I almost cried.

I had told Chrys, a couple of months ago, that I would put money on her reading by summer. He seemed incredulous at the time. That gives her a couple of months still to get some of the sounds ironed out. I think he's glad he didn't take the bet.