Learning...

Olivia has started to share some of her learning with me. I've had to be quite creative to get this out of her on occasion - mostly pretending to miss-count, miss-match, and miss-identify in order to get her to correct me. It's been fun seeing some of her new knowledge and abilities come out despite the shyness - actually, I'm not sure it's always shyness, maybe it's more of a I-know-you-want-to-know-what-I-know-so-I'm-not-going-to-tell-you-ness. If that makes any sense at all!

Recently, Olivia's really been interested in showing me she can write her entire name. We have had lots of O's covering everything in the past, and many Ol's, and Oli's, a few backwards Olivia's, and some serious "a" practicing, but not much of the entire name (the right way, that is). But, this weekend, with the encouragement of some new markers, construction paper, and cards, Olivia went name crazy. We even addressed all of her school Valentine's Day cards - I thought we'd get a jump start and do a few, but Olivia stayed focused and enthusiastic, so we finished all 16. Regarding name-writing, she does pretty well - only needing the occasional reminder that the "l" doesn't need a dot like the "i" and a little help with the letter "v." We certainly didn't give her an easy name to learn to write with so many lower-case letters that have a lot of lines in them!

Not bad according to this proud mommy! :)
Notice the "O" practicing in the upper left.

Grace getting her 2-cents worth of attention!
And, no, she's not bleeding from the mouth...that's just marker - I swear.