General Kid Updates - Josephine

Josephine is 3, and is a bundle of energy! She likes to play with her baby doll and makes such a cute mommy. She loves to look at books, and her recent favorite is the children's Bible story book, where she's always looking for Baby Jesus, and in case you didn't know: "He's a boy"! :)

She remains in the 3-year-old classroom at daycare. She is quite the talker – just like Kaylen! She loves to tell us stories of what she did, or sing songs she learned at daycare. I can’t always make them out, because when she starts putting too many words together at a time (especially singing, not just talking), it kind of gets jarbled up. But she's getting easier to understand by the day - practice makes perfect, right?!

She likes to sing “Baby bububu… Won’t my mommy be sasah-dadee", and knew it was the Baby Bumblebee song. We’d sung it in the car once and about a week later she came home from daycare singing it. That song is so silly and fun for the kids. You should hear her say, “eeeeeeewwwww!” after the mashing or licking parts! So cute!!!

Josephine is our queen whiner. Kaylen used to be but she’s been dethroned. Josephine whines when she wants a toy someone else has, when someone picks on her, when she doesn’t want to go upstairs by herself for any reason, when she has to be the first one to go downstairs in the morning and nobody will carry her, etc. We’re working on making her repeat her request nicely without whining before we respond at all. When it continues the answer is always no (or sometimes is no anyway), or she gets time-outs, which she does not like.

Like Elijah, Josephine knows the alphabet song. She does sometimes skip letters, but she has the basic phrases. She no longer says ABCDEIEIO like she used to. She can count, but isn’t as good with the one-to-one correspondence and usually has trouble getting started, and then once started gets mixed up at 4 - although I have heard her get to 6 before getting confused. I haven’t noticed that she’s had breakthrough on learning her colors quite yet, but we’re working on it.

I think they aren’t working quite as hard with her at daycare in the younger and larger classroom as they are with Elijah in the preschool room with fewer kids. She's also developmentally closer to other kids her age, so we're not working on catching up so much as just continuing to learn new things. At home we're working on the same things together - and she likes that. She's very much a kid that doesn't like to be left out of something someone else (especially Elijah) is doing.