5 years + 2 months

Emily had her sparkle on for New Year's Eve!  This is probably her current favorite outfit.  She is either wearing it, it's in the laundry basket or it's air-drying.  She usually does have matching socks.  I guess she just felt like being extra bright today!

Emily's big accomplishment this month was learning the basics of telling time.  I used The Clock Struck One: A Time-telling Tale by Trudy Harris and this manipulative clock from Emily's Scholastic bookorder.  She can definitely do 30-minute increments, is getting better at 15-minute increments and can usually figure out 1-minute increments if she thinks about it long enough or uses the manipulative clock for reference since the minute numbers are written in 5-minute increments around the outside.  She definitely has digital figured out!  I think she's starting to grasp the concept of the passage of time and what happens at different hours.  It has been helpful when she asks for a snack at 1:00pm or wonders why we have to stop reading books at 8:30pm.

Emily's downfall this month has been picking at and ripping her fingernails until they hurt and sometimes even bleed.  It is a bad habit that really needs to be broken.  She even tried putting socks over her hands while we read books together at night, but she unconsciously starts doing it one-handed.

Reading books before bed has become even more fun with Emily.  Her big gift from us was a nearly complete set of Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osborne (again from the school bookorder).  We started after returning home from Christmas travels and have finished the first three books already.  Both Emily & I look forward to finding out what will happen next!

It's a good thing we can have these nice bonding moments, because things can sometimes get a little dramatic around our house.  On more then one occasion after Emily got upset about something she declared, "You're not the best mom!"  It's a good thing I don't take this personally, because this same child would say something like, "You're the best mom because you have the best plan/idea" only hours later.

Austin gets in on the action, too.  He has been brain-washing teaching Emily about football.  Most importantly: who to cheer for.  It all started with the Steelers/Ravens Sunday Night Game.  When asked who we wanted to win, she was taught to reply, "The Ravens."  When probed why, she would reply, "Because the Steelers play dirty."  Now whenever a game is on, she asks which team we want to win and whether or not the other team plays dirty.  She does know that we always cheer for the Panthers (UNI, that is)!

Emily continues to be the craft queen.  This month seems to have involved a lot of cardboard and boxes.  Many of these boxes have collected in her room because she wants to still "use" them.  Unfortunately, they are usually rather large boxes.  Just yesterday she took a large diaper box and poked a hole in it just big enough to fit a jack for an old pair of headphones and dubbed it her "listening box".  Then she had to save the whole thing.  I finally told her she needed to figure out a way to store/organize her boxes because it was creating a bit of a hazard on her bedroom floor.  I told her if there was an emergency at night that we had to run upstairs it would be dangerous.  She took that very seriously and has them all stacked up now.  Now to find a way to permanently "let go" and eliminate them...