Sammy on the move!

We first noticed Sammy doing a sort of Navy Seal crawling thing last week, but the day before yesterday I caught it on film. He's highly motivated to capture the most potentially dangerous toys, especially balloons.

Four years and one month!

This is Olivia. She's four years old. She's having a little nap inside the tent Chris and I made for her birthday. She looks so sweet and yet full of ideas, dreams, deep thoughts, people to be and places to be. Her absolute favorite thing to do these days is to play, but more specifically to create a situation and assign roles ("I'm an evil princess, you be a dragon.") and then use props, sing songs, and make up dialog for all of the players. It's pretty funny and never really goes more than one scene before characters are changed and sets are replaced. Chris is much better an playing in these one-acts than I am. I'm not much of a thespian. I can never think of good dialog beyond "You will never live in the castle again, evil princess!"

Other than the dramas, Olivia makes up songs (tunes and lyrics), stories that basically follow pictures in her books, and tons and tons of drawings. In fact, she's so prolific that I've taken to making little books of her drawings and giving them to strangers. (Not really, but I might have to soon.)

In her outside of the home life, she's enjoying her time at Little Lights where she's made friends and admirers. We're thinking ahead to kindergarten and starting to research different schools and programs that she might enjoy. We still have time, but it's good to see what's out there.

Some challenges have been getting ready in the morning and helping to clean up toys and messes during the day. I've found that if I can make it into a game or laugh about it, she is much more receptive. But, I'll admit, most of the time I get all General Patton on her ("Put on your coat now, because I said so!") and shockingly, that approach never works or ends in tears. So, I'm aspiring to make helping a positive thing in the new year.

Four + one month is fortunate.