Springtime with the Family G

We've had several days of sun in a row around here, and Maia's organized her daily projects in the backyard (sorting pebbles into buckets, picking up grass clippings, practicing her soccer skills). We've started having our Wednesday morning neighborhood playgroup get-togethers at the neighborhood park rather than at families' houses, and Brian has begun riding his new bike to work as many days a week as the weather allows.

Can you tell that we're excited to say goodbye to winter?

Maia began her final potty training journey at the beginning of February (she'd been toying with it here and there before then), and she's now officially graduated from her "little-kid" potty to the regular house facilities. Except for nighttime and naptime (which can take years in terms of developmental-appropriateness, sometimes), Maia's totally potty trained, #1 and #2, inside the house and out-and-about. The last step of doing away with the little potties happened a couple of weeks ago. This is a huge relief and it's been a big source of pride for Maia. It's strange (and a little bittersweet) to hear her walk over to the bathroom during the day, shut the door, and do her thing. What a big kid we have in this house!

Maia's also begun pondering some pretty big questions in her own way. She's been talking about life and death quite a bit lately; some of this was probably prompted by a walk around our neighborhood after a rainstorm, during which she noticed the worms on the sidewalk. Of course, the next day, some of them were still there, but weren't alive anymore. She's exploring the concept of "decay" and is also starting to ask what happens after something dies. In my own agnostic fashion, I answer honestly that I don't know, and then I've talked a bit (in three-year-old friendly terms) about what different people believe about these "after death" questions. At the moment, Maia's fully signed-on with the concept of reincarnation, and she thinks that she'd like to come back as a shark.

Maia's also started to write letters and it seems she's beginning to read some words. She's known the sound/letter correspondences of the consonants for a while now, and she has some of the vowel sounds straight, too. A couple of times, as we've been driving here or there, and she's doing her usual "reading" of a book in the backseat, I'll hear her start to do what seems like some classic segmenting and sounding-out of words. Of course, I'm not watching her at the time, so I might be wrong about this, but it's sure what it sounds like. She doesn't seem interested in doing it with me at the moment, so I'm not pushing it whatsoever.

It feels like we might be starting to round the corner to a milestone that I wasn't looking forward to: dropping the daytime nap. She's upstairs sleeping right now and still sleeps between 1.5-2.5 hours most days, but there have been more days than usual recently that it's been decisively shorter than that. She hasn't used a pacifier for nighttime sleep in a long while, but she still does at naptime, and I sense that she's pretty reluctant to let go of that midday ritual; in some ways, I bet it feels like a really comfortable reminder of a babyhood that's moving further and further behind her. We'll see how this develops, but it doesn't feel like a phase.

That's a pretty good wrap-up for now. :)

From April 20