5.5

I just wanted to write down a few of the things Clara's doing at the age of five and a half. The biggest news of all is she's an official reader! She's been able to read words here and there for some time now, but I wouldn't have called her a reader. She would get to a word she didn't know and just guess. Like if the word was 'sandwich', she would blurt out 'snake', paying no attention to context and wouldn't even try to sound it out.

And then one day right around 5 1/2, it just clicked and she's reading everything. She's just started reading level 2 learning to read books without any help so I think she'll be ready for chapter books very soon. She amazes me with her ability to read. Even when she first started reading some of the very basic books like the Biscuit series, she used inflection in her voice. Questions sounded like questions, exclamations like exclamations and she even stressed words that were in italics (after asking me why some words leaned). I wasn't expecting that at all.

She learned to tie her shoes about a month ago and is very proud of that accomplishment. She was getting extremely frustrated that she couldn't tie them. The girl can even tie her dresses that tie in the back all by herself!

Clara loves cars right now. She's been watching Chris play Gran Turismo on the playstation and so he started teaching her the car symbols in the game. I don't think I've mentioned it before, but Chris actually loves cars. He would love nothing more than for his wife to let him rebuild some old car in the garage, so he's loving Clara's enthusiasm for cars and is teaching her all about them. She knows 3-4 dozen cars by their symbols. She knows all of them from your basic Toyota and Honda to Ferrari and Opal. I'm driving with the kids one day and she looks out her window and informs me that the Jaguar driving next to us is an old one and you can tell because of the wheels. Proud Daddy moment when I told him that one. She was watching a British car show called Top Gear with him for a while and now she wants a Top Gear birthday party.

Clara is having a really tough time right now with not getting enough attention. Robert has required an inordinate amount of attention these last few months, throwing amazing fits and generally taking up all of my time and energy. It's like a switch gets flipped with him and there's nothing you can do but ride it out and it's really been a drain on me and obviously on Clara too. She's been talking baby talk which drives me up the wall. Her voice goes up an octave and she only says one word over and over. Instead of saying, "May I have a drink?", it's "Dink! Dink! Dink!" Ahhhhhhhh! Either that or she just points and makes a little baby sounding grunt. She also will cry like a baby when she doesn't get her way.

She also can't handle it when Robert is getting physical attention from us. She has to come over and get a hug, get in the picture, play with the toy, read the book, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure that's normal, but it's just so annoying. We try to explain that she got four years of alone time with us and Robert also needs some alone time with us, but that falls on deaf ears of course. I can tell this whole sibling rivalry thing is going to be loads of fun.

Her new medications seem to be working well. She's not had any allergy problems since switching to the Nasonex and saline rinse and I don't think I've had to give her any Zyrtec either. Hopefully it will continue to work into the fall months. August of last year is about the time the monthly infections started for both of them, so we shall see shortly if it's effective.

I've been trying to give Clara a lot more freedoms and was going to list some of the things she's doing, but it was getting kind of long, so I think I'll make it a post all it's own.

And that's about all I can think of. I can't believe my child is going to be a kindergartener in only a couple of short weeks!