Gymnastics

Hannah absolutely LOVES her gymnastics class. She asks to practice her moves all the time. She's really into doing forward rolls and learning how to jump. I actually have her doing both on video. Kyle took her to class today and he said they were even doing the wheelbarrow. I haven't seen her do it yet, but I can't wait to try it out after she wakes up from her nap. She also loves doing all the stretches that go with gymnastics and I like it because it gives me an incentive to stretch too.

Here's some videos of Hannah singing. They aren't her finest performances, but she seems to clam up anytime we get out the camera and then all she wants to do is listen to us sing and then maybe, just maybe she'll chime in with a key word here and there.

This first video is of her helping sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. It's one of her favorites since we also sing it at gymnastics while we are doing stretches. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=34476017272765754&hl=en

In this video we are singing The Wheels on the Bus, but Hannah keeps wanting to sing a different verse than I'm singing! I guess only her favorite verses are worthy enough for her to sing! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5268533663290301654&hl=en

Ok, it's been a month since I started this post. Our computer crashed and we had to have it in the shop for quite awhile. I vowed to not go too long in between posts and have to write novels again, but this time it wasn't my fault!

Hannah continues to love to read her books. She will often sit by herself and read them out loud or read them to me if I ask her. She has several books that she has every single page memorized and can say at least the key words or ideas on each one! It's so neat to hear her reading and see that she's actually saying the right thing for the right page. It doesn't take her long to memorize a book either. We can check a new book out from the bookmobile and she will have it completely memorized (if she likes it of course) within 2-3 days worth of reading! It's amazing what the human brain can do. Along with her reading books, she's still doing a lot of singing on her own. She will just randomly break into song while she's playing. It's very cute.

Lately she has been extremely stubborn and has been getting lots of time outs. Her two biggest offenses for getting time outs are hitting and refusing to say excuse me. The other day she was so dead set against saying excuse me after she burped that she actually asked for her time out mat! Today she was at it again and had 4 hysterical timeouts in a row before she finally relented and said excuse me after Kyle told her that she wouldn't be allowed to leave her room until she said it. She's going to be a tough teenager I bet. It is interesting to see her personal take on discipline though. For example, she saw her friend Evelyn get in trouble one day and get her hand smacked. Now if she sees the pets or any other child misbehaving she will smack her own hand and say "BAD!"

Hannah has been really interested in counting and has now mastered counting aloud from 1-3 and can occasionally count to 4. Usually though she skips straight from 3 to 5. She doesn't really know what the numbers mean yet, but she loves to point to each thing as she counts them out and enjoys the praise she gets when she says the numbers in the correct order. Today she really made me laugh. She was playing with her Whinnie the Pooh piano and she hit the key that says, "One, 1 egg." As soon as she heard one she immediately finished the sequence by saying, "2,3. Yeah!" and clapped for herself. She cracks me up sometimes.

Even though it's not officially Christmas yet, Hannah has received a few gifts already. One of her favorites is a tea set that has characters from her favorite movie, The Backyardigans, on it. Hannah is absolutely obsessed with the teapot and all the fixings that go with it. It came with the pot, 2 cups and saucers, a sugar bowl and spoon, 4 bracelets, a tiara, a ring, and a purse. After only 2 days we managed to lose 3 of the 4 bracelets and Abby chewed up the tiara pretty good! I actually think that the bracelets are not lost, but that Abby ate them given the state of the tiara when I found it on the same day the bracelets went missing. Then, yesterday the last bracelet went missing. The missing pieces to this set really bother me because I HATE for things to go missing. I take a complete inventory of all of Hannah's toys every night and look for and always find (except for that darn cow's butt from the fridge farm! that still haunts me!) anything that isn't immediately visible. Anyway, Hannah loves this tea set and plays tea all the time. One day I caught her having a tea party with her monkey. The monkey was wearing the tiara and she was pretending to make him drink the tea. The funniest part about this whole thing is that she calls the teapot a "peapot." She can say both the word tea and the word pot, but when she puts them together she ALWAYS says "peapot." It makes me smile every single time.

We were pretty worried about putting a Christmas tree up this year because we thought that Hannah would be really crazy about it and pull ornaments off and break them or knock the whole thing over, but we shouldn't have been worried at all. She has been awesome about it. She is VERY interested in it, but she mostly just looks or touches the ornaments gently. To be safe we only put non breakable ornaments that we weren't worried about her tearing up where she could reach and any breakable ones that we just couldn't bear to go without at the top. We left off all of our glass bulbs :( and any ornaments that need hooks instead of string. One of Hannah's current favorite pastimes is to point to each and every ornament on the tree and tell me what it is. She calls this "Ooking" AKA "looking." She also loves to have us ask her where a certain ornament is and then she'll point it out. It didn't take her long to have pretty much the entire tree memorized! Once again, there's that amazing human brain at work. Another funny thing that has come up this Christmas season is that Hannah thinks that Santa Claus is Noah (from Noah's Ark). In Evelyn's Noah's Ark the Noah has a long white beard and Santa has a long white beard, so I can see her confusion, but it's still pretty funny. She gave her gymnastics teacher a good laugh over that one!

Lately Hannah has been really interested in peeing in the potty. She loves to come to the bathroom with us and say, "Pee in potty." She is quite intrigued by flushing and really wants to give it a try, but so far I've been telling her that only big girls and boys and mommies and daddies that pee in the potty get to flush. Hopefully this will give her some incentive to go once it's finally time to start toilet training. Other than a keen interest in the potty, Hannah doesn't show any of the other signs of toilet training readiness so I'm definitely not going to push it. She's so stubborn that I could see things going horribly wrong and her holding it for a week or something if we tried to teach her before she was really ready!
Over the past few weeks Hannah has developed a bit of a crush on Evelyn's daddy, Jason. Whenever he's around Hannah wants to be near him and when he's not around she asks about him. She says his name in such swoony voice and then sighs longingly afterwords that it sounds like a schoolgirl with a HUGE crush. She stretches out the "A" sound and gives the first syllable a really funny inflection. If she doesn't get over this soon it's going to give Kyle a complex I think!

Hannah is getting really good at recognizing people from their photos even if they are older photos and people have different hairstyles, wearing glasses versus contacts, etc. She has her very own photo album that she loves to flip through and name each and every person she sees in the pictures. I have several people who aren't in the book yet that I need to take some current pictures of so don't be surprised if you see me coming at you with my camera the next time I see you!
A couple of weeks ago we had a really big snowstorm come through that dumped about 10 inches of snow on us. Kyle was so excited to take Hannah out and go sledding or at the very least play in the snow. We got Hannah all bundled up in her snow pants, mittens, parka, hat, and snow boots and then took her outside only for her to decide that she wasn't quite sure about that stuff called snow. She liked the look of it, but really didn't want to touch it or walk in it. In the end she came around a little bit, but it still took longer to get her all dressed up to play than she actually spent outside playing in the snow!
One of Hannah's favorite jobs at the moment is giving the dogs treats when we put them in their crates. She loves to yell for them and then close the door and give them a treat once they are inside. When she calls for them she says, "Abby! Pum! Ella! Crate!" That "pum" is come in case you don't speak toddlerese! She hears us giving orders to the dogs so much that the other day when Kyle was watching her and she wanted me she called, "Mommy, Pum!" :) Here second favorite job is helping Kyle give the Christmas tree water. She knows where we keep the cup and will go get it, take it over to the sink for Kyle to fill it up, and then run back over the to tree and lay down and look underneath as Kyle pours the water into the tree stand. Then she puts the cup back where it belongs and waits impatiently for the next day when she can do it all over again!
Ok, I have lots more updates, but I'm going to go ahead and post this one and then make the rest of the updates a second post so people don't get too bored reading this all at once!