Ready, Set , Read!

With spring quickly approaching, I have been inundated with talk of preschool registration everywhere I go. This coming year will be the last year before Ava starts school. I have been seriously debating whether or not I want to send her to preschool. All the schools I would want to send her to are completely out of our price range, so I decided that I would just teach her myself.

I have been slightly nervous about this decision because I really don't want Ava to be behind the other kids that did go to preschool. I have not been very worried about the social aspect, though, because we do get out so much with playgroup and play dates. Ava has made some nice friends whom she adores.

So, I set out recently to find materials to start working on school readiness at home. I printed out a bunch of worksheets to work on math and handwriting. For a while now, I have been working with Ava on a great website, called Starfall. It works on teaching kids phonics to start reading.

Up until the other day, I only worked with her on recognizing letters and how they sound. I decided to try out the next level that works on how to sound out words. I didn't know how she would do, but I thought we would give it a go. She has already worked a little bit with my dad on family words, but it had been a little while. I didn't know how much she remembered.

We started by reviewing a few of the family words, and then we read a story. Much to my surprise, Ava begins to actually read the story. Shocked does not even begin to describe how I felt. I had no idea how much she has been picking up on with reading to her all the time and a couple shows she watched on PBS. I thought that it could just be a fluke. Maybe she was just getting clues from the pictures as to what the words say. Yes, she was doing that to some extent, but she really was reading the words.

I am so proud of her. A lot of the worries I had about her being ready for school are now gone. I think we will just continue to do what we have been doing, and I have no doubt that she will be fine. I have more of a feeling that she may actually be ahead of other kids that have not had as much one on one attention.

Finally!

Of the three girls, Leila was born with the least amount of hair. She is almost 22mths and has as much hair as Ava did around 18mths and Madison at about 12mths. It has also been growing in oddly. The back and front are longer, but the middle is short. It has a kind of mullet thing going on. The only things I have been able to do with it, thus far, are put it in a fountain on top of her head or push the front to the side and secure it with a clip.

Well, yesterday I was messing with it and noticed that it could quite possibly be long enough to put up in some kind of ponytail. I quickly grabbed a comb and band to attempt it. I noticed that it wasn't long enough on the sides to do one ponytail, yet. So, I grabbed another band and tried pigtails.

Five minutes of wrestling with her to sit still, I managed to make two tiny pigtails sit atop her head. I think she looks just precious. I held her up to the mirror, and she immediately squealed with delight. I put her down, and she ran upstairs to show her sisters. She climbed the stairs into the gameroom and pointed at her hair yelling for them to take notice.

They loved it, of course. Ava said that she looks like Boo from Monster Inc. We all agree. She is too darn cute for words! The only problem is she doesn't look like a baby at all anymore. She is officially a little girl.