More bragging. Too bad. :)

If you're tired of hearing me brag about how amazing my kids are, you shouldn't read this entry.  Or this blog anymore. :)  I'm pretty conceited, but this format is for me!  I'll be modest and polite in other mediums, but this has turned into a documentation of their growth and accomplishments that they might like to read someday (if they can stomach their mother's writing style), and you all get to be fortunate bystanders, if you choose.  And I may have posted about this particular thing earlier, but I am too lazy to review my entries to find out for sure.  I'm copying some of the rest of this posting from an email that I sent to my grandfather last night, after being so impressed by Audrey's writing.  I thought he'd appreciate it because he spent 60+ years studying how children grow and learn, and he would appreciate the details of what I noticed while watching Audrey work.  I seriously am not one of those "DO YOUR WORKBOOK!" kind of moms.  These girls are seriously driven, and I find that my role is actually to redirect their activities to something not as intense when they get frustrated, and help them decompress.

Enough disclaimer.  I'm sure the suspense is killing you all. :)

I bought a dry-erase alphabet book for Emily for Christmas, thinking that she would enjoy tracing over the letters with erasable marker. She thought it was all right but wasn't too interested because she does so well drawing letters on her own. She likes to draw me notes that say MOM, DAD, EMILY, AUDREY, MILO, and if I help her spell other words, she'll write them too. You saw all the lovely writing she did on her valentines!

But Audrey, at age 2 years 4 months, just spent nearly an hour working on the dry-erase alphabet book with me. Not only can she identify every letter, upper-case and lower-case, she traced them all exactly with the marker. The only thing that tripped her up was getting the lines to cross to draw the letter "x", but she was totally fine crossing a "t". Then, she traced a line that was drawn across one entire page, curving and sometimes hiding behind other figures on the page, and she connected the curving line in between and kept going. Earlier today, I saw her adding an "A" to one of Emily's notes to me.

...and then this morning, I saw her tracing letters from a wooden alphabet puzzle on a Magnadoodle.  Over the past week, she's been tracing her left hand using crayons on paper, and doing such a great job that I can't immediately tell which girl did the work.  Emily's artwork has mostly been faces lately, which are absolutely adorable.  I need to get a few pictures of them in addition to archiving my favorites.  The eyes she draws are circles with dots for pupils, equally sized and spaced and not "googley-eyed", and the noses are the lines for the bridge of the nose instead of dots for nostrils, which I find very novel.  And the smile is literally from ear to ear.  They are the happiest looking creatures!

Today, both girls are dressed in hot pink from head to toe.  Emily is busy serving up imaginary breakfast, and Audrey is snuggled next to me, asking me to eat her toes - hee hee!  Is there any better way to spend a Saturday morning?  The only thing that would make it better would be if I weren't sore from working around the house yesterday.  Only a few more months and I'll have another little girl to be fascinated by... and I won't be pregnant anymore! ha! bonus! :)