Snapshot of the girls
I’ve been so busy chronicling our day-to-day life and sharing photos that I haven’t talked much about what the girls are like these days.
Avery is in one of her best phases yet: Silly, loving, super fun to be around. With her big eyes and innocent look, she’s right on the border of baby girl and bigger girl. (I remember clearly the transition happening with other kids sometime before first grade.) She climbs on our bed and wakes me with an “I love you, Mama” almost every morning, and she’s always jumping on me, caressing my face and hair, and just wanting to chat. “You remind me of a puppy dog,” I told her just this morning. We just had our conference with her teacher, who reported that she is quiet and serious (!) at school and very into whatever is being taught. She’s where she needs to be at academically; she’s still an “emerging reader” but she’s also younger than most of her classmates – and I’m thinking she might follow her sister’s lead and begin to fully read shortly after turning six.
Zoe, meanwhile, is in a bit more of a challenging phase. Over the past month or so she has been sassier and testier than normal (especially with me!) and she pushes boundaries much more than she used to. Part of the problem, which I recently talked about with her Hebrew teacher, is that I’ve always held Zoe to a bit of a higher standard. She’s always been a bit more mature and helpful than her peers, so when she acts her age by acting out, I’m totally thrown off and wondering what’s going on. The good news is that she doesn’t exhibit difficult behavior all the time, and her teachers say they haven’t seen any change in her at school, where she’s happy as ever and still doing really well. Most of her time at home is spent reading; she finished the fifth Harry Book this weekend (a real feat – considering it was nearly 1,000 pages) and she’s absolutely in love with the series. I”m not sure what she’s going to do when she’s read all the books!
-M