As tedious as I find these updates, I know someday I will appreciate them.
Hair:
Their hair is slowly getting longer. I am not going to cut it again until it has the chance to get long. They have started letting me put it in ‘bunches’ and will tolerate some hair clips although they usually pull them out and lose them. Emma is always talking about my hair and wants hair like mine. Her hair is darkening up again this winter but it is still gold and I now have my doubts that it will ever be really dark. Leah’s hair isn’t as curly as Emma’s and it looks longer. Her hair is dark but it has a lot of red in it. I have started using adult shampoo/conditioner on them and I find their hair much more manageable. They both like it when I blow dry their hair and Leah’s has expressed interest in the flat iron…
Teeth:
They are getting much better at brushing their teeth. John got them Cinderella and Arielle electric toothbrushes and they have been a big hit. At Halloween they learned about getting holes in their teeth from eating too much candy and the idea has stuck with them and they rarely protest anymore.
Sleep:
I had them napping again in the summer but they were going to bed later and later. The week before school started we took away their naps completely, It was a rough week but they quickly settled into a new fall routine and a 7pm bedtime. They actually started going to sleep pretty quickly which made a huge difference in everyone’s life - especially Claire because she was able to go to bed in peace. John and I got some evening downtime again for the first time in months.
Things were going well and they were sleeping til 7:30am pretty consistently and then the clocks changed and it all broke. They started getting up before 6 and only recently have they started occasionally sleeping past 7am again. We put a digital clock in their room and told them they could not come out til 7am. We have messed with it but only by 30mins.
Toilet:
They night trained by accident one night when John forgot to put pullups on them. With the night training came screams of “I HAVE TO GO PEE” in the wee hours of the morning. It was tempting to pull up train them again but instead we stopped letting them take sippy cups to bed. It worked well. Every once in awhile we get woken up with “I’M THIRSTY” but it’s not that often.
I don’t remember the last time they had an accident. They go at school and the Y no problem.
In December we had issues with Leah holding her poop again. Thankfully we have learned enough about that child’s bowels that we can fix her if we’re patient. I need to send a letter to Senokot with my appreciation of their product!
Eating:
Emma has turned into a very good eater. She likes a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in addition to meat, bread and dairy. Although Alphaghetti is hands down her favourite food, it is not hard to get a well balanced diet into her.
Leah on the other hand is really bad at fruits and vegetables. Her hands down favourite is…tuna. She has gone off bananas and lately will only eat applesauce. She will eat baby carrots and corn without fuss. The other stuff is deemed ‘yucky’ or ‘disgusting’ and there is lots of resistance. I try my best not to fight with her about it but I will admit it is really, really frustrating. While Emma is a good eater, if Leah declares her dinner disgusting, Emma usually agrees out of some twisted sisterly love. And then Claire refuses to eat. Those are the fun nights. I have bought a book on adding pureed vegetables to everyday cooking and I am getting some of it into them.
The are getting good at eating the main course and for the most part they eat what we eat.
Language/Imagination:
They can express pretty much whatever they want now. Sometimes they still get caught in the crying/screaming stupidity but they quickly recover when I remind them that I’m not listening til they use their big girl voice.
All our focus on manners has paid off and they are good at saying please, thank you, pardon me, and excuse me when they want someone’s attention. They are still working out that excuse me doesn’t mean instant attention.
Their imaginations are really fun these days. They make up stories and role play. They still prefer playing with each other over their toys. Their best stories come when you ask them what the dream about. Emma in particular gets very animated when she tells a story and feeds off your reaction. It’s pretty cute.
Getting Around:
I wanted to write my dad’s observation that Emma runs like an athlete and Leah runs like a girl. Amusing but accurate.
The drop in they go to at the Y is usually gym time. They have a bouncy castle, mazes, all sorts of sports stuff, trikes, scooters etc, etc etc. It’s all about running around and I think it has been great for burning off winter energy. It has also been good for Leah and in watching her I notice that she is much more confident and coordinated than she was when she started.
Independence:
Emma is miss independent unless she’s in a needy mood. She can dress herself, go to the bathroom herself and always wants to try everything out herself before she wants help.
Until very recently Leah was happy enough having everything done for her. She would dawdle getting her coat on knowing I would just do it for her in the end because we needed to go. Recently she has started to want to do things herself.
Personalities:
I just read what I wrote when they were 3 and not much has changed.
The one big change since they were 3 is that they now hang out with kids their own age 4-5 times a week. Preschool has done wonders for them. While Emma had a really rough start, she has adjusted fine and overcome a lot of her shyness in new situations or around bigger kids. Just the other day one of her teachers was saying that Emma will now sit beside the little boy that tackled her and she has even told me that he was her friend. The thing that I was most proud of her for was that once I told her that the little boy didn’t have words and was just frustrated she accepted that and even started defending him when Leah called him naughty.
They have both done well adjusting to their teachers. I was worried that Leah might have a hard time with authority but after her I only want a yellow cup stupidity she has settled down and now understands that isn’t how it works. They love all their teachers but Erika is their favourite.
School has also introduced them to the concept of friends beyond each other. They were both quite taken with two little boys in their class but one of them stopped going after xmas so now they have both settled on one little boy. According to the little boy’s mom he talks about them all the time. He lives right up the street from us and I’m sure we’ll have to have him over soon. When I found out he lived near us I remember Leah trying to convince her blind mom she’d seen him across the street on Halloween night and me humouring her…
They both seem to have a thing for older boys and they can get quite silly about it. They laugh and giggle and hang on every word. We don’t really play with many older girls so I’m sure (this is what I tell John) that it is just an older kid thing!
Playing/sharing:
For the most part they play really well together. Considering they are always together, they don’t fight all that much and are never ‘mad’ at each other for more than 1 minute. I find the biggest problem is that as they get older I have a harder and harder time listening to them fight. Growing up pretty much an only child I have no experience with just how easy it is to push your sibling’s buttons. It makes me want to scream. I can’t even imagine what it will be like when Claire gets in on it.
We’ve let them have princess stuff and they do spend somedays in costume. I refuse to get the shoes and they both improvise by walking around on their toes because they have ’shoes with sticks at the back’
We aren’t doing as many crafts at home since they do them at school. Both girls love to colour and they can now draw simple pictures. I need to scan more of their drawings since the detail is different with each passing week. They know all their letters and can spell their names and write words if I tell them the letters. We have started working on sounding out simple words and they are starting to learn some words by sight.
They can count no problem and are ok with number recognition but the interest isn’t there just like it wasn’t with letters awhile back. I now just accept that they won’t learn something until they want to and it’s not worth the frustration of trying to teach them. They can do simple math if it involves treats or timbits- they know if they each get two how many I need to order and then can figure out how many if I wanted two etc. See what I mean about motivation 
They know all their colours and have picked up (maybe at school) that you can mix colours to get new colours. They know all the days of the week (and which days their daddy stays home) as well as the months that have passed since they’ve been in school. They have learned quite a bit at school and should be well prepared for kindergarten. Did I mention that I enrolled them…and that I’m separating them?
And thanks to Dora they know their colours, can count to ten and know quite a few new words…all in spanish. I’m sorry that I was mean to you Dora. I should have been more focused on Disney.
That’s all I can think of for now. There’s lots more but I’ll just get this up so it’s not forgotten!
