It’s been great fun watching Zoe grow and mature these past few months. There was a big difference between 33 months and 36 months, but I think perhaps there was an even bigger one between the 3 year and 3 year, 3 month mark!

Preschool is playing big role in Zoe’s life; she’s excited about going, and she has learned a lot. I can always tell what they’re focusing on in class because she talks about it at home; one day, out of the blue, she started talking about shapes; on other days it was trees and snails she was talking about. She’ll often burst out with something I know she picked up from her teachers; she recently scolded me, for example, for not paying attention to her and said I needed to put my “listening ears” on. (That’s something they obviously do at school!)

Her school has sing-alongs on Mondays and gymnastics on Wednesdays (Zoe recently learned to do a somersault), and they do art projects (which are her favorite things to do, I think) almost every day. Throughout the year, they also teach a lot about Jewish culture and holidays: Zoe can now say and sing several blessings, including the hamotzi (blessing over the bread), and she can sing Happy Birthday in Hebrew. And during Hanukkah she would come home and report on how many candles needed to be lit that night.

Zoe’s favorite things to do at home are similar to what I reported last time. She plays make-believe a lot; most of the time, her imaginary friends are kids from school, but sometimes Dora and Boots come by for a play-date too. She also loves playing school, telling stories (as seen here), cooking and playing “Happy Birthday” (by making “cakes” – usually out of toilet paper or tissues – and having us blow out the candles), and pretending she’s a doctor. She also talks about being sick (even when she’s not) and asks to go to the doctor a lot; I guess she’s a big fan of Dr. Fernandez, and the “boy doctor” she recently saw.

In terms of skills, Zoe can identify all the letters of the alphabet and can almost spell her sister’s name. (She’s had Zoe down for awhile – it helps that it’s short!) She now knows her shapes, as mentioned above; just yesterday, she surprised me and Q by drawing (for one of the first times) rather accurate-looking circles, squares and ovals. She has also started to do some simple math problems (if there are four objects and we take two away, she knows there are two left, etc.).

Her speech gets better as she gets older, but she still mispronounces a few words. For a long time, Dr. Fernandez was “Dr. Nandez.” Beautiful comes out as “booty-full,” and excused comes out as “accused.” (We recently taught her to ask nicely to leave the dinner table; now every night we hear, “Can I be ACCUSED?”)

Zoe still has a bit of a bossy personality – she likes to take charge when possible, and she always tries to negotiate things with us. “I have an idea,” she’ll say, before launching into a plan that will allow her to watch another show, get a treat, stay up later, etc. As example, just this weekend, Q bought a cookie and told her she could have one bite now and the rest after her nap. “How about I have a bite now, a bite when I get home and the rest after my nap?” she said. “Would that be a good idea?” (On a funny note, before Zoe was even born, I wondered if she would wind up with this type of personality.)

As for bedtime, her ritual has been the same for some time now: she usually watches a 20-min. show to unwind and then gets a book, story and song. She started having some rough nights (tantruming and refusing to go to bed) about a month ago, and we tried different tactics to make the nights better – with varying degrees of success. A few weeks ago we started giving her “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” based on her behavior, and there’s a funny story related to this. I was having a bad day and snapped at her recently, and she told me, “I don’t like it when you talk to me like that, Mommy. Thumbs down.” (After I told her I was sorry, though, I got a thumbs up.)

Zoe still loves playing and cuddling with her sister, but recently (within the past few weeks) she has started taking toys away from her when Avery’s playing with them. She usually gives them back and says “sorry” (after I ask her to) but I suspect this is the just start of that form of sibling rivalry!

And speaking of Avery, Zoe very much likes to give us little reports on what she’s up to. She looked into Avery’s room and told me recently, “Avery’s crawling around in her crib.” She always tells us when Avery’s crying (often she’ll hear her cries before I do!) and one morning she yelled to us from her room that Avery was awake. “Is somebody going to get her?” she called out.

She can be very sweet – she’s known to come up to us and give us a kiss for no reason. And I like when she gets happy and excited about the simplest of things. Recently, when packing Zoe’s lunch, I asked if she wanted some ranch dressing for her carrots. “Oh, that would be very, very nice,” she said excitedly. “Thank you!” (Comments like that make otherwise mundane tasks/moments special.)

And, lastly, some stats. She was recently weighed and measured, and she comes in at 41 lbs and 41 inches. That puts her in the 96th percentile for weight and 97th for height. No wonder she’s wearing some 5T clothing!

-M

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 9:39 am and is filed under 43.Two kids-February 10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.