It is our job in this blog to relate the month from November 16 to December 15 right as we leave for our trip to Disney World for Elia and Albert’s birthday and the holidays with Erin’s family. In this time too is Thanksgiving at our house with Albert’s family. In Albert’s family Elia is the youngest granddaughter with the next oldest being Curie, and the next oldest cousin being Dylan a full 6 or 7 years older than Elia. This means that as Curie gets to a point where she can play with the cousins, Elia will always be younger without a cousin with a comparable age for her. On Erin’s side in her immediate family, even if her sister has a child immediately after getting married (if they decide to have children), it would mean a 5 year age gap between Elia and the next child. Fortunately, Erin does have a cousin with children comparably aged to both Curie and Elia, and Albert has friends who similarly started later and has friends with children closer in age to Elia. All this to say, at events, Elia doesn’t have a lot of playmates as the cousins are too old to play with her and not yet old enough (with the exception of Jared) to make it a point to play with her.
For the holidays, we bought the kids new tablets in the form of the Kids Kindle Fire 8 HD. We had reservations about buying them their own tablets, but our iPads are pretty long in the tooth and take forever to boot up. The new tablets are colorfully encased and come with a subscription to a wealth of content that the kids love. Curie is more enthralled by it, and Elia will want to actually play instead of play with her tablet. Interestingly, Elia will prefer to watch on a phone rather than her tablet, likely in association with being grown-up. In this time (with Erin throwing her phone in the bathtub) we got new phones and relegated the old phones to back-up status over the KRZRs we have. Albert had even more reservations because this effectively made kids phones if we are not careful. Bottom line, we need to use the parental controls a little more on the tablets, but on the whole, the tablets are a good addition to the kids’ entertainment – especially if we need to keep them occupied.
Elia is a natural athlete and Erin keeps talking about getting her involved in something. The other day Elia began throwing the frisbee and was very very accurate with her side arm even 10 feet out. She also was 50% on shooting a basketball one handed in the hoop with Agnes (Agnes makes it a point to play with Elia) when they visited. And Elia is readily able to do somersaults, jump off four steps, and much much more. While Albert’s family was here, Curie did get sick and Albert took care of her while everyone else went out. Elia is still afraid of Albert’s father because of the hair and beard, but she was willing to hug him and approach him as long as Albert was with her (Curie unflinchingly gave Albert’s father a hug). Elia took a long time to warm up to Albert’s mother, but they were able to spend quality time together. Perhaps it is because Elia is the youngest, but Albert’s mother does take a particular interest in her.
We had Elia’s birthday party on the 9th the week before her actual birthday at Busy Bees where she loved being the center of attention. She had friends from Skyline and from Rosslyn there and only wanted to hang out with Samira, a girl from her class now. She insisted she was four even though it was not yet her actual birthday after the party.
Elia still needs to be prompted to say “cookie” instead of “tookie,” and still has not mastered the “r” sound yet, but she is as sharp as a tack, listening and imitating, loving to pretend with any of us, playing with Curie, and taking a stand on what she wants to do. Lately, she has started making the growling sound when she is frustrated: “grrr,” like Bert of Bert and Ernie might do when he is mad. She loves her dresses, has expanded beyond the Belle dress and competes with other kids for length of dress, twirlablity of dress (whether or not it spreads out when she twirls). She is shy around others, but outgoing amongst us, loves to make up songs and sing, dance and cook and play All beautiful things about being four years old. Of course she is more contrary now, won’t help if she doesn’t feel like it, whines more or cries more when things don’t go her way or she doesn’t get what she wants, but we have to remember that Curie went through this as well and is only coming out of it, and as much as the laughing and dancing, this is what it means to be four. More later, feeling grateful for everything now.