March Odds and Ends

There are twelve days until baby sister arrives and about as many blog posts to do to be totally caught up in time for me to overload you all with teeny tiny baby pics.  So, prepare yourself for a barrage of April and May, coming in the next week.  I'm going to try really hard to get it all done!

This one should wrap up March, with a few odds and ends of cell phone pictures grabbed here there and everywhere.  This is day to day life though and it's so good.  Can't overlook the "normal" moments.

I hate that this is the only picture I got of it, but Clara took swim lessons in March/April and did a fantastic job.  Here she is with her teacher Miss Jessica!  We're ready for the pool this summer!

Again, not an awesome picture, but here is is all decked out in her Demon Deacon gear for School Spirit Day at school.

We made another trip to SciWorks with Chloe before both these girls become big sisters in May!  They treat each other like sisters, so I think they'll slip into their new roles just fine.  They're hibernating like bears in the top photo.

And as warmer weather FINALLY arrived, we spent a lot of afternoons like this, tromping around in the woods in the backyard.

 And kicking the soccer ball... (wearing a too big hat, per Clara's insistence.)

We also made Clara's first trip to the Winston-Salem Children's Museum.  What an awesome place, right here in town!

Celebrating Chloe's third birthday with her and other friends.  Wish the weather had been this gorgeous a week before!

And with that... March is a wrap!

Clara at Three

{Warning: Mommy-bragging ahead.  She's my kid and I love her, so just humor me.}

When Clara was first born, it was hard to imagine how I would love her more with each day, week, month and year that passed.  Parenthood is pretty remarkable that way.  As much as I delighted in her as a baby, I find that the older she gets the more I love her as the person she is becoming.  I suppose that’s always how it goes and that no matter how wildly I love her now, it will only continue to grow as she grows.

 

With that said, three years old has long been my favorite age for humans.  I know they are emotional and unpredictable and sometimes very challenging, but I love them.  I love the way they see the world and the vocabulary they have to express it.  I love how full of life and joy they are and how their honest expressions of their truths refresh me.  I love how thirsty they are for knowledge (even when it means they ask “why” literally thousands of times a day).  I love how they still say “lello” for yellow.  I love how they abandon reality to enter into a world of make-believe and seamlessly transition back into this hard, sometimes cold world with innocence and bravery.  I love that they are still babies who will hug and snuggle and cuddle, but that they are also real people with ideas and opinions and growing personalities who are fighting for independence and autonomy.  I love this about three.  But I could never have anticipated how passionately I would love seeing it all in my own child.

Clara at three is an absolute joy.  She savors life in a way that makes me wish I could bottle her awe and wonder for all things around her.  She loves people and it’s becoming more and more apparent that she is likely an extrovert.  She moves to the beat of her own drum and is not one to simply follow what the rest of a group might be doing.  In fact, we’ve been hearing a lot lately, “My teachers say I wander off at school.”  (Sorry, teachers.  She hears you, but the implementation is not quite there yet.)  She is brave and courageous, if not a bit prone for drama and hysterics when that bravery backfires.   She has an unbelievable vocabulary and we are surprised daily with some new word or phrase she has picked up, internalized and used correctly.  She also has a remarkable memory, which I hope she can hold on to.  I remember so little (hence the need for journaling, blogging, obsessive photographing), that I’m amazed at the details she will recall many many months later.  She has a great sense of humor like her daddy and the only thing better than when she makes us laugh is hearing her little laugh at something that has tickled her.  She is loving and kind.  She is full of energy and never stops moving, talking or singing. 

Clara at three loves:

• Being outside.  I really believe that she has a connection to her Creator that makes her a different, more peaceful, more joyful child when she is outside in His world.  She notices the breeze blowing and the birds singing and tiny wildflower weeds that we grownups just pass by.  She doesn’t have to be running hard or playing anything, she is just happiest when she is outside.  Spring has been so good.  She still loves to swing, especially her tire swing in the woods.  She likes to find “hiking sticks” for herself and other, much smaller sticks to offer Rufus, her constant sidekick.  She’s learning to peddle her tricycle and ride her scooter and she loves playing with bubbles and chalk and water.  She loves to go to the park and visit the horses and talk with people who are walking their dogs and have picnics and just take it all in.  She loves outside.
• Music.  Listening to it or making it.  Right now we’re on a pretty big  Frozen soundtrack kick, but she loves her other CDs of nursery rhymes and Wee Sing Bible Songs and other “kids’ music.”  She loves to listen to us sing hymns and I’m again amazed and how many lyrics of how many hymns she knows (better than I do!  I have to use an app!)  She falls asleep to a CD of instrumental hymns.  She loves playing her harmonica, or creating musical instruments out of anything that will tap or shake.  She loves dancing to music. 
• Reading.  All those experts aren’t kidding when they say that reading to your kids really matters.  Of course I’ve always believed that as an educator, but I cannot express to you how amazing it is to watch language develop right before my eyes with Clara.  She loves print: books, magazines, pamphlets (a word she surprised me with recently), whatever she can get her hands on.  She loves going to the library and choosing new books, but also loves reading the same ones over and over again for weeks at a time.  She memorizes them quickly too and can already engage in a lot of the “pre-reading behaviors” that I look for in kindergarten students.  She talks about authors and illustrators and will point out the difference between fiction and non-fiction.  She loves poems.  She makes connections between books or between books and real life that I marvel at.  The reading comprehension skills that I work with teachers on developing in school age children, I can already see beginning in her: inferring, predicting, making connections, questioning, determining importance and more.    It has been a real treasure for me to watch her language and literacy skills unfold right before my eyes… just by reading with her.  I’m so thankful that she loves reading and I hope she always will. 
• Playing pretend.  Whether it’s doctor, or grocery store, or vet, or zookeeper, or babies, or dentist or (lately) “Anna and Elsa,” Clara is fully in the pretend play stage.  I love seeing her imagination take over as she creates alternate worlds and acts out roles as she imagines them.  She also loves making up stories and will often say, “Let’s tell a story together!” as she enters a world of spoken make believe (Sweet Mama is largely to thank for that.)  She is expressive and enthusiastic and creative and I love it.  She is really into making up new words, and telling you what they mean.  (For instance, the birthday gift she wants to buy for everyone is a "poofer."  If you ask her what a poofer is she says, increduously, "It's what you use to DECK THE HALLS!"  Of course.)  The theatre person I used to be loves to watch her pretend play and knows that it will serve her well for lots of things in life ahead. 
• Animals.  Stuffed animals, real animals, books about animals, YouTube videos of animals… I guess it’s pretty common for young children to be obsessed with animals, but Clara is no exception.  The other night in the bathtub she asked me, “What do you know about armadillos?”  Not much, Clara.  Sorry, kid.   She is fascinated by creatures that live far away and loves to pet every dog she comes across on a walk.  She is not scared of many creatures and loves to visit zoos and aquariums and parks where she can see any kind of living critter.  She’s especially enamored with birds of all kinds, skunks, dogs and cats, and anything she has an opportunity to touch and interact with.  She’ll tell you what grown up and baby animals are called (“a BOY sheep is a RAM and a girl sheep is a EWE and a baby sheep is a LAMB”) and what sounds they all make. 
• Arts and Crafts.  She loves painting and mixing colors of paint.  She loves stickers and cutting and gluing.  She loves to make cards and “draw” pictures, although she’s truly not much past the scribble stage.  She loves working on her art easel in the kitchen and doing playdough. 
• Her family.  Clara is truly a people person and loves lots of people… friends, fellow church members, strangers at the grocery store who might just want to hear a story about “one time…”.  But family is something special and the way her face lights up extra for me and Robert (and Rufus) and the way she talks already with great love and fondness for her little sister is so dear.  She’s lucky to have grandparents that she sees frequently and who adore her (and whom she adores).  Watching how she has transformed us beyond just a couple and into a true family unit makes my heart swell, and I know that her little sister will complete that feeling for us. 

I guess I can’t do one of this big “milestone” updates without at least a brief mention of her medical state.  We simply can’t believe it, but she’s essentially been cleared from everything.  We saw her surgeon for a three year follow up and he said she no longer needed yearly, routine x-rays.  I took a two page typed list of stuff to talk with her (infinitely patient) pediatrician with for that checkup, but left being told to wean her off of the medication (prevacid) she’s been on nearly her entire life and that she’s 20^th percentile for weight so we can switch from whole milk to 2% and quit treating her like an underweight child.   Her first cold and flu season without synagis shots and being in school was a little rough; she did get RSV and more than her share of colds and coughs, but she weathered it and came out the other side just fine.  She’s physically and developmentally totally typical.  While there’s always a possibility that she could face some sort of future complication, no one is expecting that at this time and we are able to really let go of a lot of the fears and worries we’ve carried for the past three years.  Or at least try to….

      I’m sure there’s more I could say about her, and because I know my memory will fail me some day and I often want to just freeze time, I feel the need to try to capture what life is like with her right now.  But these words and images will have to do for now.  I can’t wait to see who else Clara will become in the year ahead.  Three really is grand.  

Big Girl Room

We've been slowly working on Clara's big girl room since Christmas in hopes of moving her into it on her birthday (and making room for baby sister in the nursery.)  It's been an evolving project, but I'm so so happy with how it turned out.  I started with this beautiful quilt that Robert's Memaw made years ago.

I love the bright colors and just think it's so special to have something handmade by her great grandmother in her room.  We asked Clara what color she wanted her room to be and she insisted on blue, so Robert I painted it one Saturday morning in January.

Once the room was painted, I started searching for fabric for the curtains and stumbled on this which just felt perfect for Clara.  Not only did it match the blue perfectly, but it brought the outside in to her room.  She's a nature girl for sure, and I loved this subtle touch.  Mama K did the hard labor of turning them into actual curtains for us (and made some pillows too!)

 Then, to complete the nature feel without totally overdoing it, my dear friend Sarah, who is extremely talented, came up from SC to paint some wildlife in Clara's room.  You might remember that Clara was a chickadee for Halloween last year... this child really loves her some birds.  And these sweet little touches tucked in on door frames and in corners are so perfect and so dear. She might not forgive me for posting these, because she was exhausted from 12+ hours of straight painting, but here are some "in progress" shots:

Clara wanted to draw on the walls "just like Ms. Sarah."

They couldn't have turned out any better.  Now, commence oohing and ahhing at these masterpieces:

Male and female cardinals (NC State bird):

Chickadees:

A box turtle munching a strawberry:

Mommy bluebird bringing a bug to her babies:

A writing spider:

And a rufous-sided towhee:

Robert spend several months working on building Clara the shelves I wanted for her books.  I'd seen "gutter" shelves before, but Robert wanted to make them himself, from wood, and they look so good.  He loves being able to make things with his hands.  Since Papaw died, Robert has slowly been learning how to use all his woodworking tools and it's a special way of connecting with him and that past.  I love that so much of Clara's room is hand-crafted by people who love her.  The goal was to have her in her big girl room by her birthday, and we came down to the wire, but at about 9:00PM on Sunday night, Robert got those shelves hung.

And TA-DA!  Here's the (mostly) finished product.  I still need to frame a few things for the walls, but it's mostly done.

 So, here's Clara in her first night in her big girl room.  So excited!  And she stayed in her bed all night long.  (Now since then is a different story, but we're working on it....)

 Sweet dreams, my big girl!  We had so much fun making this room for you and I'm glad you love it!