5 Years

We have a 5 year old! But, thanks to Covid, she's not quite off to kindergarten yet, so we get one more year with her before school starts.

5 Year Stats:

Weight: 37.1 lbs (30th)
Height: 41" (~25th)
Head: 21" (99th)

Favorites:
Foods: Any fruit and veggie (esp raw). Loves pasta, steak, sushi, edamame, cheeseburgers (a new discovery). She's a great eater and will try just about anything.
Books: chapter books, non fiction books
Things to do: swim, play at the park, play games, fish, tennis
Loves: arts and crafts, puzzles (200 pieces), music, My Little Pony, her bunnies

What a year! It's been quite the transition year for us from leaving Singapore, traveling in Taiwan, staying with 3 different friends in Houston for 2 months, living with grandmas and grandpas in the midst of a pandemic, and a 2 month road trip, but Emmeline has handled it all in stride! She's done well with all the transitions, lack of school, and new experiences. I think she thrives on new challenges and experiences, a bit like her parents, I guess!

 

Swimming continues to be a favorite pastime, and before Co-vid she was swimming 25m lengths in both front crawl and backstroke (March) to the point where her swim teacher recommended she move up to the class of 7-8 year olds. Sadly, we never got to do that as Co-vid closed all the pools. In the meantime, she's been climbing everything she can find from trees and ropes to rock walls and rock boulders. She's also discovered a love of being outdoors collecting leaves, acorns, rocks and catching frogs and butterflies (May onward). She tried fishing in April and has been hooked since, learning to cast and reel in some pretty big fish!

Games have become hugely important in her life the past year. It all started with playing with Mila in Houston in February, and now we have nightly game night with her before bed. From My First Carcassone and Sleeping Queens (where she became an expert at adding 5s and 10s) to SkipBo and Outfoxed, she loves pretty much any game put in front of her. Sometimes we forget she's only 4, as her strategy is quite good and she can think like an adult!

Although school has been very intermittent this year, she has learned soooo much! Just after she turned 4, rhyming finally clicked and she was a rhyming machine, rhyming any chance she could get. A few months after that she started to become really interesting in writing and reading. She would write lists of friends names and attempt to write birthday cards with no help sounding out words. She also started spelling and reading CVC words and was eager to "read" familiar books to Cora, pointing with 1:1 correspondence. She also began reading level a books (Pigs Can Fly was first book she read), though her interest waned for a bit after this until about April when she was more interesting in reading leveled readers again. She's still not entirely into the reading bit, as math is her true love. Her number sense is astounding, she understands tens and ones places, can add single and double digit numbers (demonstrating use of tens and ones groups to add), can subtract with numbers below 20, understands greater and less than, and all around just loves math. When we hiked on our road trip, she just wanted math problem after math problem the entire hike.

Emmeline continues to be curious and eager to learn. She still loves dinosaurs, but is also interested in how things work, how things are made and likes to ask why and big picture questions (March and April). She is very excited when she learns something new or has done something new, and runs to tell whoever is around, jumping up and down and using her hands to tell the story. We hope she never loses this eagerness to learn!

Can't wait to see what our teeth-peeling grape eater does in the next year! And one of my favorite quotes from her this year--when discussing the dictionary and what it's used for, I told her now most people just look up what a word means in their phone, but we used to use a dictionary. Her response: "Oh, like in the 90s!"

We celebrated covid style with a family party outside. Combined with sprinkle pancakes in bed, a trip to the zoo, and McDonald's for lunch, I think she had a pretty great day!