Writing Machine

Lately Hannah has turned into a little writing machine. Now that she's mastered the alphabet and begun to crack the code as far as reading she's moving on to another challenge-writing legibly. She's been able to write H for the longest time, but now she's not as interested in learning to write single letters-even ones she can't do yet. Now she wants to write WORDS. So far she can independently write CAT and HAT and is really close on writing her name. A 6 letter word is a bit daunting even if there are only 3 different letters! She can write many other words if you spell them for her, but cat and hat she knows how to spell and can write without any prompting. Lately her favorite single letter to write is E. It's her newest addition to her collection and the first letter in Evelyn's name so that makes it special I think. Here's a running count of the letters she can independently and legibly (about 80 percent of the time) write: A, C, E, F, H, I, L, N, O, Q, and T. She's getting really close to being about to do D, B, U, M, V, and X, but those letters aren't always legible if you didn't know what letter she was writing beforehand. She's also started to do some meaningful drawing although we don't always know what it is she's doing. The two coolest examples involved the use of her magnetic writing toy that she got from Kyle's aunt and uncle for Christmas. It has these little magnetic stamps in the shapes of animals. She took one of the stamps that is a duck and stamped it on the screen and then took the pencil and drew a circle around the duck. Then she turned to me and said, "The duck's in the pond." The other instance that really got me was when she was returning from Mamaw and Papaw's house one day. I was so shook up I had to call them right away to ask if they had taught her the skill or if she came up with it on her own. When we left my parent's house someone had drawn a smiley face on the toy and left if on there instead of erasing it. Hannah took the pencil and drew circles around the eyes and said, "Mommy, he's wearing glasses!"

Potty training is going VERY well. We've made the switch completely to big girl underwear during the day, even when we are out, except for naps. Hannah rarely has accidents anymore and I've stopped taking her to the bathroom except for when she tells me she had to go unless we are getting ready to get into the car. I've made a rule that we ALWAYS at least try to go pee before we leave home since there is no bathroom in the van! I am so thrilled to be rid of diapers. It is absolutely liberating to not have to worry about toting along tons of them or searching for sales on them at the store. However, now I have several packages of them leftover from sale expeditions that I have to figure out what to do with. I'm considering selling them on craigslist for a discounted price to get some of my investment back.

Going along with Hannah's independence in potty training, she had made several more steps towards becoming a big girl. She has given up sippy cups altogether except for car rides and independently washes her own hands after going to the bathroom as long as she can reach everything. One day she went to the bathroom by herself and once i heard her get off the toilet I went to check on her and she was "washing" her hands except she couldn't get the water turned on so she was just squirting more and more of her purple foamy soap on her hands. It was absolutely EVERYWHERE on the counter, sink, and cabinets.

In two weeks Hannah starts preschool. I'm very nervous about it. Hannah on the other hand is pumped. Everyday she asks if she has preschool. She's really excited about having a teacher. I'm not sure she quite realizes that there will be other kids there and the teachers won't be there solely to teach her stuff. Hopefully it all goes well and that she really learns how to interact with kids her age well.