Yesterday morning I was at the swimming pool and a little class of five year olds came in for lessons. I watched them and found it a little too easy to imagine Alyssa amongst them. She is very keen to be five.
Alyssa continues to be very caring and maternal. She and her close friend at daycare spend the bulk of their time looking after the toy babies. She adores her tiny cousin Ryder and is very gentle with him.
At home, she doesn’t have quite so much interest in helping me in the kitchen as she used to, but is usually busy immersed in complicated imaginary games. Today, she invited all of her imaginary daycare friends to visit her imaginary swimming pool in the living room, and they had imaginary swimming lessons together.
Recently she has been most interested in letters and reading and writing. She loves to play a modification of eye spy – “what is in the trees that starts with P” she asks, and eventually has to help me out with the answer being Possum. She likes to think of as many words starting with a particular letter as she can. However, although she can write most of the letters, and sound out all the consonants in words and usually get the vowels, she balks under any remote pressure of writing much apart from Alyssa, Ally, Toby, Mum, Dad, Angus and Nani. The more adult-goal oriented encouragement Alyssa receives, the less she engages. She is not a performer.
Toby celebrated his second birthday last Thursday, June 30th. His wee personality continues to develop along the same themes. In contrast to Alyssa, he is a bit of a performer and loves to make people laugh.
He is courageous and brave, and is eager to give anything a go. This is probably contributed by him adoring his big sister, and being keen to join in with whatever she is doing. Remember how Alyssa ignored the toilet until she was 2 3/4, and could use it entirely independently. Toby, in Toby fashion, is just keen to get involved and give it a go now. He likes to get on it between each nappy change and concentrates very hard until he does a little wee or fart. Then toilet paper, flush and hand washing.
He has a fairly extensive vocabulary but is really only just starting to construct sentences. At times he strings about four words together, other times it’s just a couple. Alyssa is very helpful at interpreting what he is saying, although often this is just an exact mimic of what he has said which isn’t as helpful as she thinks.
Toby continues to have a voracious appetite and often eats adult quantities of things. He also isn’t remotely fussy and tucks in to what ever he can get his hands on.
Overall, there is just something about him that is absolutely delicious. It might be the way he says ‘oh’ in a perfectly agreeable fashion, or the way he articulates things like ‘darling mummy’, ‘please mummy’, and ‘love you’; or maybe it’s the little patch of soft skin on the nape of his neck. Perhaps it’s that he is at this incredible age where any things that frustrate him only do so in an endearing fashion, and aren’t remotely tiresome. Or possibly, it’s just that he’s mine and thus I love him so.