Party Montage

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Happy Birthday to Piper

We had Piper's birthday party at Incredible Pizza. It was very busy, but she still had a lot of fun with her cousins. I made cupcakes and Erick deocrated them to look like Dora. She opened presents and has enjoyed playing with all of them over the last week.

General Update

Child's name: Piper

Age (in months, or years and months): almost 36 months! She will be 3 on the 11th, so I guess this is my last general update here.

Physical abilities: She got a real hula hoop and a real jump rope as an early birthday present from my sister. Previously, she had been using various things around the house to play the part. She is not great at either one yet, but she can get the hula hoop around a couple of times, and she tries so hard to jump rope. Maybe soon she’ll figure it out. She can write her name and use a computer mouse correctly. I had to bribe her to get a video of her writing her name. She was being as silly as she could to push my buttons, but I kind of still got a record of it.

Speech/language: vocabulary, sentence length, etc: speaks pretty well in long sentences and clauses. Vocabulary is good, as in I have nothing to compare it to but she uses some fairly complex words. She surprised me by counting to 8 in Spanish the other day. I wonder how many other words she knows since she is not a performer at all. The main language hang-up she has right now is using “her” in place of “she”.

Reading/pre-reading: She knows a couple sight words and her name, but I have not done anything with her in the longest time. She reads her books to herself and tells the story by the pictures even if she’s never read it before. She reads to Stella all the time too, especially the concept books with a picture and one word. Asks me to write other words like mom, dad. and caterpillar. She knows environmental print like store signs and traffic signs.

Number stuff: I overheard her count to 8 in Spanish and 11 in English. Direct teaching has no result. She’ll get it when she gets it. Getting better with patterns.

Other cognitive stuff: puzzles, reasoning, etc: She is very interested in games right now, board games and especially computer games. She is quite proficient on the computer and easily starts her games up to play. These games work on patterns, letters, numbers. shapes, colors, etc. Some of it she already knows, but its still fun for her. She loves to do mazes.

Creativity: Loves to make lists, especially birthday lists, and tells me what to write. She drew this picture of a birthday cake a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t posted it yet. The cake is sitting on a plate and has 6 candles, apparently she thinks she should be six this year. The swirls on the cake are the sprinkles and icing.

Imagination: most of her play is pretend play now. She loves her dollhouse and her regular dolls.

Social:really wants to be and play with other children. She is still a bit aggressive at times with others her own age. She is wonderful with Stella, and does everything she can to make her happy when she is sad. I love that she gets up every day and tells her good morning. She talks to her like a normal person and not a baby, which is so nice to hear. She also “translates” for us what Stella is saying.

Character/personality: Still aggressive but can be very sweet and loving. I’m ready for the terrible twos to be done. She never really has true tantrums, but she is very vocal when she wants something, and has little patience for waiting.

School Updates: n/a I’m looking in to sending her somewhere for a couple days a week just to be with other kids.

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