The heroine of our story has just passed her halfway mark into her fourth year. I try to tell her to relax and enjoy being four since, after all, she won’t be four ever, ever again. She doesn’t quite roll her eyes at me when I say it, but she doesn’t pay much attention to it. She’s very, very anxious to be five already. I’m not sure if she actually wants to be five years old, or if she just wants to have her birthday party. Either way, she’s pretty sure that this four year old thing is getting old. Oh well, I’m enjoying her as a four-year-old and I’ll try to mark some of what life is like with our four and a half year old.
She’s fascinated by letters and writing, and knows her sounds and is putting sounds together in words, but is not quite, quite reading with comfort yet. She did write her first book a few weeks ago, “The Family That Lived in a Crowded House.” She’s still figuring out how to write the letters in the correct order (left to right, all on the same line, there’s so much to remember!) but she illustrated the book and was terribly proud of herself. She “read” it to both J and I – it was a story all about a family who lived in a crowded house, then they saw a stranger outside and got scared so they hid in the closet. Then they realized the stranger was just a man walking his dog and they all came out. The End.
She has a great vocabulary but sometimes will make up words. Often times the words make sense, they just aren’t typical grammar. My favorite is when she describes a chilly day as “really brrr-ing cold!”
Over Thanksgiving we took Clare to see Frozen in the movie theater. It was her first movie in the theater and she found it a little bit overwhelming and scary. Honestly, I think we could have waited a bit but I thought that she would like it. She talked about it for weeks afterwards, specifically the characters of Anna and Elsa and she regularly sang the songs. I bought the soundtrack a few weeks back and we’ve probably listened to it 20 times since then. She and I are a couple of musical theater peas in a pod.