Sock Gorilla and another visit from the Tooth Fairy
Zoë lost her second "wobbly tooth" tonight. I had to help a bit, but I barely had to do anything to get it out (in other words, I don't just go around yanking out children's teeth willy nilly). No doubt she'll go to school tomorrow and show her school friends the new gap. Apparently, they were all very interested with her previous lost tooth.
In other matters, Zoë made herself a... well, for lack of a better term, a puppet. It's made of a pair of dark socks which are held together with a clothes peg in a special way that Zoë arranged. To me, it looks like a butterfly, but she insists that it's a gorilla, and she's been playing with it for several days now, even taken it to school!
And the funniest bit is that when I picked up the "gorilla" and rearranged it a bit, put the peg back on a different way (because I, being ignorant, didn't know how to do it properly). Zoë took it from me and informed me that what I'd made was, in fact, an OWL (she wasn't eloquent about it, but it was clear that she was telling me it was an owl)!
We've decided to just let her have the pair of socks with the clothes peg until she gets tired of it (and she will, eventually; she always does). Imagination is a wonderful thing and its to be encouraged. If a pair of socks and a clothes peg can be a gorilla (or an owl, for that matter), we're okay with that.
Milestone: Lost tooth!
Zoë's wiggly teeth have been getting steadily more wiggly. Today, one of them was very, very loose, and it was bothering her. She kept fiddling with it (as you do), and she managed to twist it and make it bleed. I got a piece of clean gauze and got the tooth and pulled it out (stright up, rather than mucking it around the way she was), and then gave her the gauze to bite.
We put the tooth in an envelope to put under her pillow, and she spent about half an hour skipping around and showing her "tooth all gone" to everyone, and looking in the mirror.
She's settled down now, watching a DVD. I can't wait to see her reaction to the coin in the morning.
Teeth and school and so forth
Zoë has two loose teeth, both on the bottom on the front. She doesn't seem especially bothered by it, but I noticed it myself. Okay, "notice" isn't really the right word. I was actually looking for loose teeth, because she's nearly seven and it seems around time when she'd start getting them.
I told her she didn't have to worry, that her teeth will fall out and then she'll grow new ones, and we've even promised her that if she puts her teeth (once they fall out, of course) under her pillow, the tooth fairy will come and take them and leave money. (No idea what the going rate for teeth is these days; we're thinking of that which Aussies refer to as a "gold coin donation", that is, a $1 or $2 coin).
I don't think she'll actually believe that a real fairy came and took her tooth away, for what it's worth. She does have a vivid imagination, but she's pretty smart and it's not exactly rocket science to figure out that it's not really some random fairy leaving money under your pillow, you know? But it's a fun game, anyway, which is why we're playing it.
In other areas, she's doing well though she seems very tired much of the time. We're in the final term of school and it shows. Poor kid has been getting up at 6:30 in the morning all year to ride "the white bus" to school and she doesn't get home until 4:30 or so. She's made tremendous leaps in communication and behavior and general educational things (she's reading and doing simple maths now), and I think it's all catching up with her. As much as she loves school, I think the summer/Christmas break will be much appreciated (though I'm not so sure I'll appreciate it with the way the little girls bicker all the time, ugh).
Anyway. Loose teeth. Tired. Doing well. That about sums it up.
The Weather
Yesterday, it was quite warm, and Zoë went to school in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, without any jacket. Today, it's very grey and considerably colder (well, it is Melbourne, after all).
At breakfast, Zoë looked outside and then announced to her father, "Yesterday, was sunny and hot. Today, is raining. I need a rain coat."
To many parents, this would be unremarkable. To us, it's amazing. Not only is she making observations about the world around her, she's speaking about past tense events and she's doing it in context, on the spur of the moment, and she's asking for things relevant to her observations.
I've always known that she's smart and able to think and reason. I've seen lots of evidence of it, and lots of examples of her cleverness. She didn't do well on the formal IQ test she had to take, but I think that was because she wasn't that interested in cooperating, not because she couldn't work it out. For all I know, she looked at the puzzles and tests and worked it out in her head and decided she wouldn't do it because she'd already figured out how (I'm not betting on that, but it wouldn't shock me, really).
Now that she's got growing language ability, she's much better behaved and generally a lot happier. I believe this is because she is smart and she has been terribly frustrated by her inability to understand the world around her (the world is amazingly language-based; it's the one thing that truly sets humans apart from most of the animal kingdom), and her inability to communicate her thoughts and observations and desires. Now that she can do that more and more, she's just much more content.
She's still got a long way to go and a lot of "catch up" to do, and she needs to work on some of her more subtle social skills (she's good with saying please and thank you now, and other appropriate social things like hello and goodbye), and her speech is still quite behind others her age (and her diction is often very poor, indeed). But the improvement this year has been truly amazing.
I'm so glad we decided to send her to a special school instead of trying to shoehorn her into a mainstream one (really, I never had any intention of putting her in a mainstream school, but I know a lot of parents who do exactly that in some sort of attempt to make their child "more normal" or something). Her progress is just fantastic.
Monster House
Both little girls expressed a desire to see Monster House. We hadn't actually offered to take them to see it because I worried it might be too scary, but they were both very clear that they wanted to see it, scary or not. So we went to see it.
In 3D.
This was another concern, of course, that they'd be able and willing to keep on a pair of 3D glasses for a whole film, but it turned out to be perfectly fine. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.
First, we went to a cinema in a quite large suburban shopping centre that we've been to before. We were driving around looking for an advantageous parking spot and Andrew noted, "The cinema is over there," and Zoë must have been paying attention, because when we parked, we went to go into the shopping centre (we were early for the movie and wanted to get a few things from the shops), Zoë was quite adamant that we should "Go dat way!" when "dat way" was the general direction of the cinema.
Once we convinced her to come inside and assured her that we would, indeed, be going to the movie, she was okay. We got some fancy popcorn (from one of those popcorn vendors that has caramel, cheese, and other flavors), then we got some drinks from Starbuck's, and Zoë was able to communicate what she wanted (we asked her "hot or cold" and she said hot and we asked "caramel or vanilla" and she chose caramel, so she had a hot caramel milk).
When we went to the cinema she was very interested in the 3D glasses, which, by the way, are much more sophisticated than the strange paper ones with a green and a red lens. These are polarised and look very like normal sunglasses.
Zoë was very interested in the movie and didn't seem too upset or scared. I did keep a hand on her to comfort her and remind her that it was okay and just a movie, and a couple times I felt her jump during scenes where you're supposed to jump because something deliberately startling happens, but there were no worries (unlike The Hefalump Movie which upset her terribly when the baby hefalump couldn't find his mother!).
When the film was over, Zoë gathered up all the 3D glasses and said "I can take away the glasses," which was, of course correct. On the way out, we saw that The Nightmare Before Christmas is coming out in 3D and we're certainly going to see that one (we have the DVD of the film, though not in 3D, of course).
Movies, particularly 3D movies, are fun, it would seem.
|