4 years, 8 months

Esme can play with her Legos without much help now, except assembling some of the more fidgety parts, insides of window pieces etc... she is not making anything elaborate, but it is cool to watch her making walls and windows and doors in her little house-like structures. She is also capable of making multi-step plans for things she wants to do - gathering the materials for it, and doing most of the task herself.

Example: She went and gathered up many bottles of acrylic paint from the school room downstairs, after locating her palette and clearing space on her table to put paper down. She took her water jar downstairs to rinse and fill with new water. Sometimes we are having a mom/dad discussion and she still can't take not being the center of attention - so I encourage her directing her frustration towards something else... and it is nice to have and watch her plans come together then. Her painting scheme came together today while we were talking about a server backup for something Mark was working on.


sunset with sheep eating grass
when the sun goes down he will sleep and snore
she was not done with it yet...

She is learning to mix purple here - and likes that very much. The purple will become a 'big dark' and she will add a moon.


When she decided it was 'done' we can hang it up now

She asks many more questions now, lays out long descriptions and 'then this happened' type stories.... she still has some trouble with time in general. A lot of things are still 'yesterday' which can mean 5 minutes ago or three years ago... she is experimenting with other words like 'this morning' but doesn't know which to use yet. It is all coming together - and very interesting to watch it do so. Her reading and counting are things she is interested in, but not focused on. She is very into building things in the sand, with rocks, with sticks, painting and using blocks. Her imagination is immense and intense.

She can understand a lot, but usually finds her own way to interpret it and then clings to that interpretation pretty hard. When I was stuck in Minnesota she describes it as 'you were at work in the water, with Nana, and Daddy came and rescued you, on the airplane, with the truck.' She said that Nana had to take her medicine and grow in her heart, and she grew in her heart, too - and now she is bigger, and can do more things like spell words and look in the microwave without a chair and build Legos. Not too bad..

She also really likes going to our flea market - and seeing the chickens and ducks. We are looking at pictures of Araucana chickens, their eggs and babies and she is having a grand time with that, as well as learning how to navigate back and forth without help from the image viewer to the page, look through the page, and then go back without having to type anything back in. She isn't great at spelling yet... although she is trying it frustrates her quite a bit. It doesn't help that I type so much half of my 'important' letters on my keyboard are no longer visible :)