Kid Stuff

What you can't tell from the above picture is that Jacob is ALSO wearing a bat-faced baseball cap under his cowboy hat. He is a bat cowboy.

Jacob's house with library.

"Who could have POSSIBLY made this mess!?! Certainly not sweet, little ol' me..."

Jacob is actually sort of coloring in the lines and being picky about correct colors for the first time.


And here is his name.

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KIDS' SPECIAL SKILLS:

Jacob:

ART: Still builds amazing buildings. Not really a fan of coloring, but did great on Elmo coloring this morning-- mostly in the lines and colors were appropriate. Likes to paint "machines." Likes to talk about sculptures. (In Jacob's world, bird baths also count as sculptures.)

SCIENCE: Jacob's favorite weather is the moon.

MATH: Jake and Kris count to 100 almost every night. The 10s are the hardest, but he's almost ready to count to 100 by 10s by himself. He asks adding questions all the time. ("Go ask your Daddy. He's good at Math...")

READING: Jacob has several books practically memorized, but seems shy about actually reading them. He can recite Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?, Go, Dog! Go!, Green Eggs and Ham, and What's the Time, Mr. Wolf?, and The Spooky, Old Tree. He likes to bring me books that we're read before and tell the story using the pictures.

WRITING: Jacob can mostly write his name. He needs help with the A and the B, but everything else is on his own. Right now his Js are backwards and his C is actually a U, but whatever...

ATHLETICS: Today, Jacob has figured out that he can jump from his bed to Ella's bed across the room. He is crazy. He jumps everywhere he goes and often tells people, "I am really, REALLY good at jumping!" He's been going to KidFit at the gym where they run around and throw balls and stuff. He likes to ride bikes, but feels a little intimidated by the size of the bike he got for Christmas. He gives it a try evey now and then, but if we make a big deal out of it, he stops.

MUSIC: Jacob makes up songs all the time and likes to play them on the piano. They kinda all sound the same, and if he wasn't yelling the lyrics at the top of his voice over the sound of the banging piano, you might think that he was just being destructive...

OTHER: Jacob is really good at computer games. He plays educational games at pbs.org and has no trouble using the mouse or typing his name. His favorite games are World of Goo, Yo Gabba Gabba, and Curious George.

Ella:

ART: Ella likes to color, but not on paper. Mostly on the table or important paperwork.

SCIENCE: Ella likes to pick her nose and bring us the boogers. She's also fascinated by tooting and goes around saying, "You tooted!" even when no one has. Perhaps she will excell in microbiology...

MATH: Ella can count to 16.

READING: Ella loves books and has general topics she wants to hear. "Wanna reada bunny book." She's woring on recognizing emotions so she likes to point to pictures and say things like, "Monkey sad." or "They scared!"

WRITING: All over the place and on everything. We say she's in her multimedia/street art phase.

ATHLETICS: Ella is what you would call a natural dancer. She likes to do a "trick" where she points her toes and lifts one leg behind her like she's doing ballet. She's also quite the jumper, though she definitely has more of a death wish than Jacob (if you can belive that!). This morning as Jacob was jumping from his bed to hers, Ella was following suit and jumping from Jacob's bed to the floor-- a good 2.5 feet drop.

MUSIC: Ella can sing any song she's heard 3 times. Her favorites are Hey, Hey We're the Monkeys, High Five, Rock a Bye Baby, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, and the ABCs.

OTHER: Ella's been asking us to change her diapers for a couple of months now, but she's just started asking to go to the potty. We don't have a little potty for her yet and she's scared of the big potty, so she hasn't really had a chance to try. Her vocab is amazing and she mostly speaks in sentences. We call her the wunderkind...