Kamy has been digging and digging for attention lately. She is totally a Daddy-attention sponge and will soak up as much as possible. Fortunately, she’s doing more positive, encouraging, and helpful things to pull our attention to her! She’s becoming much more supportive and encouraging to others and is starting to do it more proactively.
Kamy loves to help in the kitchen and she helps make breakfast almost every morning. She’s learning ingredient names, measurements, and oven settings. I let her turn on the oven to a given temperature, set a timer, and run the microwave to melt butter or heat water. She keeps begging me to let her crack the eggs, so I foresee a lesson (and an extra dozen eggs) in our near future. =) It won’t be long before I start turning over breakfast!
Intellectually, Kamy is working on several skills. Rhyming is very fun and she will play a game with Caden where they bounce back and forth shouting out rhyming words (or rhyming non-sense at time). She is also showing more interest in teaching Caden how to do things and I’ll often overhear her sharing tidbits of wisdom from her advanced age. =)
Kamy has figured out multiplication! She understands the concept of what multiplication means and is always looking for situations in every day life she can apply it. She knows that 3 x 3 = 3 + 3 + 3. We’ve also talked about how order doesn’t matter on multiplication (or addition), so she can switch around the numbers to make it simpler to calculate. Kamy’s also learned that if she already knows that 3 x 4 = 12, then 3 x 5 = 12 + 3. I’ve purposefully avoided using manipulatives for math concepts thus far, since she can figure it out mentally and with her fingers at this point. She loves do to her “Bedtime Math” book and really likes doing the more challenging problems.
We drove to Tennessee to help Garin and Jess move to DFW. Before we left, I printed out a map of the US so we could play the license plate game. Kamy would make an educated guess from the first letter on the license plate as we passed and then color in the states as we found them. Surprisingly, there were a lot of trucks registered in Maine, which provoked an interesting discussion (and Google search) on why such a small and far away state would have so many license plates on the road. We even found two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, which put me in hot water for not printing a map of Canada too. <wink> By the end of our trip, she’d found 28 states. We’ve been slowly adding to the tally as we come across them.
As promised, Min took take home with her after Easter to make a quilt! Kamy was super excited to go with Min by herself. They had a great time! Kamy picked out all the fabrics from Min’s stash and sewed all the interior seams. She’s a perfectionist and a great listener, so she did a fabulous job. Her corners matched and her lines were very straight. According to Min, she was even singing softly as she was sewing, which made Min about the happiest she could ever be. =P Unfortunately, Kamy came down with something on day 2 and Min had to finish up the borders for her, but Kamy went home with a completed quilt which now has a place of honor on her bed every night. Someone is already asking when she gets to make another one. I have a feeling it is the first of many.
Oma and Opa gave Kamy a new bicycle for her birthday! She’d far outgrown the 12″ bike she received at Christmas a year and a half before, so it was definitely time. It’s a 16″ bike … and of course it is pink! It took a couple rides to adjust to the much larger bike frame, but she’s speeding around on it already.
Lastly, we picked up a mini fruit cake from Collin Street Bakery on our way home one day. There’s a CSB mid-way between DFW and home and makes a convenient potty stop for the kids and has nice clean bathrooms. Even better, they will give the kids a free cookie, so it’s become somewhat of a tradition now. Since CSB is famous for their fruitcake, we figured we should at least try it. In Kamy’s very descriptive words, “It looks like a little bit of jello on a hamburger patty!” I can’t fault her power of observation! The kids liked the fruit cake, but Keller and I both will take a pass next time.