Growing Girls in a New Home

We have been practicing sitting reverently in chairs for church, and Lizzie decided that she needed to fold her arms when I sat them in chairs. When Sadie saw what Lizzie was doing, she decided she needed to, too.

I just wanted to put up a few new photos of the girls, since it's been a while. Life is busy and happy. We are largely (but not entirely) settled in, and we are doing well. My girls are growing up way too fast. Sadie is starting to move into 18 month size clothes already, and thinks she should do everything Lizzie does. On Monday, she threw a full-blown temper tantrum when I wouldn't let her follow Lizzie out onto the floor at gymnastics. I was very surprised, as that's unusual for her. Also, she has started walking a little. Her longest distance without help is about six steps, but I have no doubt she'll be running after her sister in no time.

Lizzie is loving her new room, park, friends, gymnastics, and primary. (There are only three kids in our branch, and the two brothers are only there about half the time, so Lizzie just revels in all the attention-and food-that gets lavished on her.) She was having a hard time with some discipline issues for a while there--with the stress of moving, we got to revisit those terrible twos that we thought were past. But she's doing much better now, and we are mostly back on track again.

She has been fascinated with letters for a while now, so just a little before the move I got the Leapfrog Letter Factory movie for her. Before we got it, she knew maybe about eight or so letters, but now she knows all the letters and sounds and she points them out everywhere we go, asking what the words say. She sings the song from the movie all the time. Don't tell her, but I have it on good authority that the Great Pumpkin may be bringing her the Leapfrog Talking Words Factory movie before long.

This morning I was doing bills, and Lizzie wanted to help, so I gave her some of the papers I was finished with to color on the floor beside me. After I while I glanced over her shoulder and saw this:

When I asked her what she was drawing, she pointed to the top and told me that she was writing letters. From left to right, she identified them as I, W, N, V, I, U, V, not a letter, and Y. I was pretty impressed.

A little later, she was singing to herself "a Mommy, a Mommy. . ." while she wrote and colored, and I asked her if she would like to write the word Mom. When she said yes, I sounded it out slowly for her and said it started with an M. She wrote her M in the bottom right hand corner (it looks more like a scribble). I told her an O was next, and she drew the great big circle in the middle of the page. Her second M is to the left of the O, right next to where I had written 8.21, and looks more like a W.

I know it's a little silly, and no one would ever guess what it was, but I'm still so proud that she wrote my name!