Costume Pics

Here are some pics I took from the church halloween party tonight. The other little girl is Ryleigh, the girl I watch during the week. Linda is dressed as a cat, and Ryleigh is dressed as a mouse. How cute! Linda had a great time. They had a soup/chili dinner and then had a carnival. Linda was pinning the tail on the cat, bowling w/pumpkins, ring toss onto the spider, trying to eat a marshmellow suspended from the air w/just your hands, and doing a cupcake walk (numbers all in a square and you walk while the music is playing. when music stops you stand on a number, and they call numbers out. if they call yours, you get a cupcake.) They had prizes at each game too, so the kids loved that. They also had doors in the church decorated, and the kids could go trick or treating to each door. It was a fun time. Linda of course was wound up, and didn't get into bed at her normal time. It's 8:45pm right now, and I still hear her in her room singing. On the way home from the church she was talking about all the games she played. They also had face painting. Linda got a flower painted on her hand. Tomorrow our street is having a get together before trick or treating, so we will be going to that as well. Happy Halloween everyone!

It's Almost Halloween

Linda is going to be a cat this year, thanks to our friend Kristen, who gave her a costume. Linda went to a halloween party yesterday at JW Tumbles. It cost $5, and it benefited Make a Wish Foundation. She was able to use their gym and play. Of course she loved that. I turned around to find her 1/2 way up their rock wall. She also got her hand painted. She chose a blue pumpkin to be painted on her hand.


She has been reading in a couple books more now. I'll point my finger at the word and she will read it. Today before nap she said to me, "you aren't reading these words, I am." So I think she may start to like reading the books herself more. Last night she was reading the sentence, "some kids dance, and some kids sing." She saw the word sing and said "dog." For some reason if she sees a word w/a g in it, she will assume it's the word dog. So I took a second to try to explain how sentences in a book need to make sense. They just aren't random words. And we repeated the sentence to say, "some kids dance, and some kids dog." Hopefully she could see (which I think she might be too young for this) that "some kids dog" doesn't make sense. After we determined the word wasn't dog, she sounded it out and was able to read the word sing. when she is reading words in the books herself, she does get distracted easily, so we just do a page or two at a time.

We have a halloween party tonight we are attending, so I hope to get a picture of her in her costume up here.

Update

Here we are again. It's been over a year since I've blogged about Linda. I can't believe it has been that long! Linda turned 2 1/2 in September. I figured I would start up again, as it's a nice way for our friends and family to know her day to day, or week to week life. I'll try to get on here at least once a week. Please post comments, so I know someone is reading! lol

Today we went to our local farm for their harvest festival. This picture was taken on Tuesday of this week. Linda had such a good time, she wanted to come back today w/daddy. Today was no different from Tuesday. She wanted to be w/those silly chickens almost the whole time! She caught another chicken today too. She gets so proud when she catches one. It was cute today b/c she would take the chicken to the other kids coming in and out so they could have a chance to pet and look at it. She also enjoyed the bounce houses very much. She tired herself out for sure. Thankfully she was so busy in the petting farm and bounce houses, we didn't get a chance to ride the overpriced carnival rides.

Linda has developed into quite an amazing little girl. She got out of diapers in early June except at nap and bed, yippee! She is very physically strong. We bought a swing set the end of this summer. It has a rope ladder and some other climbing things. That kid went right up every thing the first try. She likes to jump off stuff, and so somersaults, and flip upside down on everything, and just be crazy. I would like to get her into some sort of tumbling or gymnastics class as she is quite co ordinated. She seems to enjoy sports as well, again yippee! We still can't determine which handed she will be. She is still using each hand equally.

And of course, she is very smart as well. We started working on writing her name. She can do the L and the i quite easily, as they are pretty easy letters to write. She can do the n. Sometimes it's hard to know it's an n, unless it is near the L and the i, lol. We started working on the d. I think that may take some time. I'm not sure she has the fine motor skills at her age to do it, but she is practicing. She can also write several other letters.

One thing we are pretty excited about is she is now reading. It is really amazing to see her read a word. Some words she knows by sight now. About a week ago Tom and I were sitting and we showed her the word run. I knew she did not know this word by sight. It was so cool to see and hear her sound out each letter, and then put the sounds all together to form the word. She has read some four letter words as well. She obviously still has such a long way to go before even reading a book. As you can imagine, we are just so proud of her. I have been trying different things to keep it fun for her. We went on a word scavenger hunt the other day. We walked around the neighborhood and found words that she could read. Since she loves sidewalk chalk, I wrote a bunch of words in the driveway. I would show her a word and say, "This word is something we wear on our heads." The word was hat, and she would read the word. We did several like that. She doesn't seem to like that as much as hunting for words. Any other suggestions would be welcomed.

I guess that is about all from here. Please check in from time to time and leave some comments so I know you are out there!