Week of March 9 - "Fantastic Daddy!"

"Fantastic Daddy!", said Emily recently when asked how she liked her new work book for practicing letters. Followed immediately by a very animated laugh of glee, as captured by my handy dandy camera.


Yep, that's my daughter, always with the big words and phrases, with heavy does of enthusiastic energy and passion these days. This moment of hilarity was followed quickly by Emily singing Old MacDonald Had A Farm while she continues to draw practice letters. Hmmm, she multi-tasks too! Go Emily!

What Emily is so excited about is that we recently gave her a wipe & clean letter and shapes practice book. It has 26 pages of practice exercises to help toddlers begin to learn to write letters and draw shapes. It uses a wipe clean black marker (which is why you see Emily wearing a bib over her white blouse :-P (just in case).
Each day, Emily spends some time doing crayon/coloring book (one of her favorite hobbies) and now can choose if she wants to color or if she wants to practice letters. Practicing letters is a new experience so that is winning out more often then not right now when Emily chooses an activity. And she is already getting pretty good at drawing letters by following the dotted practice letters. It took her about 2 minutes for Nancy to walk her through the process, and then she was up and working letters on her own.


And Speaking of letters, Emily can sing her alphabet almost perfectly now. For some reason, "X" still does not make the cut with Emily. But all the other letters are present as she sings her ABCs, and she is even working through LMNO better rather then just MMMM. :) Emily knows all her lower case letters now as well and likes to point out letters we ask her to on signs, or just about any other printing she looks at. She is doing great in this area of learning.

Potty training is progressing along, and we are having good success now with Emily going poop on the toilet. It helps that she is pretty predictable (right after meal time 80% if the time) and so that sets the stage to put her on the toilet and make progress. Going Pee has it's good days, and it's bad days. She is doing well in the mornings because that is the first thing we do when she wakes up. During the day, sometimes she is good about telling us she needs to go, and leaving her pull-up dry, other days not so much. I guess it depends on how preoccupied she is with some form of adventure at the moment. As you can see, she works well when there is structure, not so well when she is on free lance fund and adventures. That is pretty well true for Emily in most things, so no surprise I guess.