Funny Nicknames

Cianna explains in the car that all the kids have nicknames: She is "Cici" Natalia is "Nini" and Peyton is "pee pee." As soon as it came out they just busted out laughing so hard. I explained that maybe we should find a better nickname for Peyton because it wouldn't sound very appropriate shouting pee pee at her all the time. LOL!

Peyton's behavior

Peyton has been getting more and more difficult with her behavioral issues and at school gets in trouble fairly regularly, so coming home with a green smiley instead of a yellow or red one is very exciting. This year, she has received detentions for 1. Spitting at a kid who was "being mean" and 2. kicking a student for touching her stability ball, which was her substitute chair to help with her hyperactivity. This week was a whole new one, she got a red for "showing her butt to a friend." AHHHH!!! What do you even say to that? I am sure I have a ton more surprises ahead of me with this one. I need some extra patience if I am going to make it.

Cianna and gymnastics team

Cianna was invited to join the competitive gymnastics team in fall of 2012 when she was only 5, which was very exciting, but she was not really ready then. The practices are 2 hours long and we tried 2 out and she was in tears on the way home from being so tired, so we just did another year of recreational gymnastics at a level higher. She joined the team in 2013 and loved it, had a great year. She even got a first place on bars once and man that was really exciting. She learned all the skills for level 2, including her backbend kickover, which took a lot of practice. At the awards ceremony, she recieved the fun "drama queen" award. She is a great athlete, but does tend to draw out those injuries for a little extra attention. This year she is on team again at level 3 and it has been difficult to do this along with soccer, but she was not ready to quit either, so we are just making it work. Luckily the club she goes to is very flexible and let her just do what she can, without penalty. She is working on learning her back hand spring this year and really enjoys all the team activities they do like gladiator night, team sleepovers, parent's night out and summer camp.

Peyton and her moody self

Peyton had a humongous tantrum tonight, just one of those moody nights that kept getting worse and worse. She kept screaming how she wanted her dessert, but that was clearly not going to happen tonight. Once she was finally over it, she went around and apologized to everyone and  came to lay with me in bed. Now I am getting a foot massage, what a nice change. However, I was told she couldn't massage my legs because they are too spikey and "perhaps I need to shave." Oops!

sight words

peyton is learning sight words now in kindergarden and doing great. she likes to say the word then try and use it in a sentence. yesterday the word was 'as' and she was pretty close on the pronunciation. her sentence was pretty"get your as over here." oops!

Enjoying summer

This summer was Cianna's first experience with a "summer break." I thought it was important to emphasize that this does not mean a complete break from academics, so we bought a summer bridge book for both girls to keep them busy with some school work and not to lose what was learned last year. They have both been good about doing pages in their workbook and Cianna is even keeping a writing journal where she writes about fun things she does. Peyton has made great progress as she now knows all her letter names and a handful of letter sounds. Cianna will be more than ready for second grade math. Placement testing is in a short 4 1/2 weeks so we'll know more then. Cianna has gotten to experience a bit of summer camp with fun field trips and we even did a day of gymnastics camp and is in a week of British soccer camp this week, which she loves. She has continued the gymnastics classes through the summer and they offered her a spot on the competition team again. She understands it more this year and is actually excited to try it out. They moved her up to a class with 7-11 year olds earlier this year (she is 6) and she is not only keeping up, but can do some things independently that the other girls need help with, especially the uneven bars. I think it will be great for her.

Diversity

Peyton is starting to notice differences between people, but her way of explaining it is quite humorous. The other day, we were at gymnastics waiting for Cianna's class to finish up. Peyton puts her arm next to mine and says "mom, we are the same. We match." Then she follows that with "Cianna and dad speak Spanish so they have dark skin." Since much of our audience around us was Hispanic, I tried to figure out the most PC way to answer this. Matt doesn't even speak Spanish, but I explained to her that Cianna speaks Spanish because she learned in Kindergarten, just like Peyton is going to. The dark skin she is referring to is from Cianna's fantastic tan from being outdoors most of the summer. Peyton's next response was "so when I learn Spanish in kindergarten I will have brown skin too?"