Five years with this beautiful, happy, loving girl.
She's smart, funny, beautiful, and the best big sister there is. I can not believe that she's five. (In fact, I may be in a little bit of denial about it.) But in all honesty, within the last few weeks she's really started acting older, like a full-fledged five year old. *sigh* My sweet baby girl.
Stats:
Weight: 39.4 lbs (48%)
Height: 41.9 inches (38%)
Mostly 5T or 5/6 stuff. Hasn't lost any teeth. Bright blue eyes.
There are so many things to remember about Lydia right now, and there's no way that we'll even come close to capturing everything. But here are some things from this stage with Lydia:
--This open mouthed smile = the best. For a short minute I tried to tell her to "smile like this" and showed her a normal smile. But then I realized that this smile wouldn't last nearly long enough and I embraced it and I can't even explain how much I love it. Lydia has such a love of life that a tiny smile just can't contain it.
--Sometimes we have a super tight schedule and are running from here to there all day long, and other days we just hang out on the couch or take 3-hour baths. Lydia enjoys it all. She's a go-er when we need to go and she's happy to stay home when we want to rest. She likes playing with friends when they are over, but she's more than happy to play by herself (or with Austin). Although she's incredibly energetic, she's also (usually) very easy going and happy to just be along for the ride!
--She likes American Flags and is good at spotting them everywhere we go.
--She's very interested in volcanos and tornados and we talk about them all the time.
-She's really started to enjoy crafty things like painting, perler beads, and stringing beads.
(I can't believe how young she looks in some of these pictures from six months ago. It's crazy how much can change in such a short amount of time.)
--She loves her family and she is very vocal about it, telling us all frequently how much she loves us. However, she also frequently tells me, "When I'm a mom, I'm going to let my kids do whatever they want. I'm going to be such a nice mom." I'm glad that she's looking forward to being a mom herself, and I just have to laugh at her perspective on parenting. (She sometimes tells me that I'm the meanest mom ever, which hurts my feelings but she bounces back and in five minutes she's telling me how I'm the best mom in the world and that she loves me so much. Emotions are big when you're almost five.) The sweetest thing she's started saying "I love you ten one-hundreds... that's one thousand!"
--She was so excited for "our baby" to be born and we talked about it all the time. When I was pregnant she often would put her hand on my tummy when we were laying down before bed and we talked a lot about our baby. She also liked hearing the heartbeat at all my doctors appointments.
--She's such a good share-er. Especially with her treats. She gets candy and more often than not she saves it in her candy stockpile instead of eating it, and if she pulls some candy out - she's equally as likely to bring out half of it to share with someone else. We call her our "saver" because she saves candy (Austin is a "spender" for sure), but that doesn't mean that she's not completely willing to let you have half - or even the last bite. It's so sweet.
-It's gotten easier to do her hair. For a while she threw a tantrum every day because she disliked it so much. It was such a battle. I started doing a "hair chart" and she got to put on a sticker for each day that she let me do her hair without crying. After a while, it just got better - even if we weren't remembering to put on stickers. I'm so relieved about that.
--She definitely has her own personality and she owns it.
--She likes to help in the kitchen, everything from making food (preferably treats) to playing with the sink sprayer while I do the dishes. She's a good helper.
--She loves the snow! She loves to go play in the snow and even got a little snow shovel for Christmas and loved using it. She'd go out with David and help while he was building the most awesome sledding hill in the backyard or help him when he was shoveling the front yard.
--She loves quarters and quarter machines! If I really need to bribe her to do something, all I have to do is promise a quarter in return. For as good as she is at saving her candy - her quarters practically burn a hole in her pocket. If she's earned one, she asks non-stop when we are going to go to the quarter machines until we go. I kind of love quarter machines as well, so I don't really try to stop it. (David thinks it's a waste of money - but I think it's so fun.)
--She's getting really good at more advanced board games. This "Sneaky Snacky Squirrel" game is one of her favorites. We've also started playing "Trouble" a bit and she likes that a lot, too.
In January, (so at almost 4.75) we started her in a real preschool. Before that we only had her enrolled in an online preschool (Upstart). She had been asking to go and we thought it would be a great thing for the last half of the year. I'm sooo glad that we didn't put her in it in September, but it was a great thing for her over the past couple of months. She really liked it. Her teacher Ms. Alyson was amazing and Lydia loved her so much that she invited her to her Birthday Party. Alyson came and was so sweet about it. We're all going to be sad when she's not Lydia's teacher anymore.
--Lydia thinks that she is SO funny. And really, most of the time she is. Her jokes typically lack a real punchline but she laughs so hard at the end of them that you can't help but laugh with her. She's very clever and has a good sense of humor and her laughter frequently fills our house to the very top (she finds something that she thinks is funny and does it over and over while she laughs about it for a long time at a very high volume).
--She likes playing with play-doh. Especially "play-doh you can eat" which is basically just homemade fondant - made of marshmallows and powdered sugar. It's stiffer than regular play-doh but she really enjoys making things no matter what the play-doh medium. She gets more creative by the day.
--For as much as Lydia likes the snow, she loves the swimming pool an equal amount. And lucky for her, our Legacy Center passes means that she can have the best of both worlds.
--We got her roller skates for Christmas and she loves them. She does such a good job on them. I'm incredibly impressed with her gross motor skills. We'd also been talking about going ice skating for a long time, so we finally went. I think all her practice with her roller skates paid off on the ice rink because she did such a great job. She loved it and has talked about it quite a bit since then. She came home from school one day, weeks after going to the skating rink with a page that had "Thank you for..." typed at the top and she'd drawn a picture of ice skates and her teacher had written "for letting me go ice skating". It was so sweet.
--If you ask her what her favorite part of preschool is she always says "Snack!"
--She likes the museum and is glad we have passes again.
-She had a lesson on the iron rod in Primary and made her own Iron Rod. She still talks about it all the time - it really made an impact on her.
--She is so so beautiful. Her smile melts me. All of those last traces of toddler are completely gone. I can't believe how much of a little girl she is. Spunky, funny, and so big.
-She loves her cousins. Aubrey & Camille are some of her favorites. Little Jason follows her around wherever she goes and she loves that about him and takes such good care of him. #cousinsmakethebestfriends
--She's started really getting into imaginative play. She plays with her stuffed animals more and has started giving each of them names. (She hadn't really done much of that before.) She plays pretend and has such a good time doing it. She pretends to be a dog all. the. time. One week we played "Lydia is a dog at a pet store and mom or dad need to come to the pet store and pick her out for the puppy they want to take home" at least 150 times. The same words every time. Over and over. She loved it. We loved her and tried to be good participants in her favorite "imaginative play scene."
--Emotions are big when you're an almost-five year old. We participate in a range of emotions every day. Both David and I try to be kind and patient no matter what. We aren't always successful, but truly - it's hard to learn how to master your emotions!
--This one is the biggest of all the things I want to remember. It should be the very first bullet mark. But Austin is so lucky to have Lydia as a big sister. She plays with him all day long and they are the best little friends. I truly can not express how well they play together or how much they love each other. It's rare to have them really fighting, for the most part - they just love being with each other. They are so sweet and I hope they are always good friends. (Also, Austin recently went from calling her "ee-yah" to "Lid-ee-ah")
--Not only is she an incredible big sister to Austin, but she's also the sweetest big sister a baby could ask for. She adores Baby Caleb and it always singing him songs, covering him with blankets, bringing him stuffed animals, and talking to him. She's also soooo good at putting his pacifier back in. She's such a good helper to me and her kind attentions to him are constantly rewarded with big eyes and bigger smiles by her favorite baby. (Also, she calls him Bae-boo and it's cute.)
--I don't have a picture of this, but when she's telling you something and she's concentrating really hard she squints her left eye and squishes her face. It's totally subconscious, and so funny.
-She gives the best little thumbs up sign when she's happy about something, or even instead of saying "okay". Her thumb doesn't stick all the way straight and you can tell that she has to think about it to make her hand do it, but it makes her happy and it makes me happy, too.
--She's kind of silly and likes silly things. I think one of her favorite days of the whole year was April Fools Day. She loved the food-tricks and spent the day "fooling" me.
--She wants a dog. Like, real bad. I took her to a pet store and let her look at fish and birds and things... and now she wants a hamster. I told her that if she saved up enough money to buy all the things (about $60) then she could have a hamster. It's now her dream. I'm less enthused about it, but mostly because I know that she doesn't want a hamster as much as she just really wants this cool hamster tunnel cage. (When talking about how she's saving to buy a hamster, she talks about this tunnel cage more than anything else.) We're not getting a dog, and I don't want a hamster either.
--She loves Paw Patrol. Have I mentioned that? I'm shocked that I don't have any pictures with her toys because she has at least 25 different paw patrol figurines/toys. All the pups both big and small, plus their little cars that they drive, and other assorted figurines. She plays with them all the time and really loves them. I like Paw Patrol, too and think it teaches good things and it makes me happy to see her using her imagination so much and playing with her favorite toys.
--David helped her make this awesome pup-trap on the side of our entertainment center. She had this perfect picture of what she wanted it to be, but it involved using a drill to open up a gaping hole in the wall. After trying to find a solution that would work with both her and us, (and some tears about us not letting her drill a hole in the wall), they came up with this and it was really cool.
--Her drawing really took off and now she's incredible. I feel like overnight she went from scribbling to drawing fully formed stick people. I'm not exaggerating. She just wasn't interested in it at all, and then suddenly she was. She draws family pictures all the time, colors really well, and just enjoys participating in art (in any form, really). She's also really interested in writing words and if I tell her the letters in a word, she'll write out full notes to her dad or her friends. She's getting better every day and knows how to spell a lot of words, herself.
--She's been doing an online preschool and although I'm fairly opposed to pushing academics too early, she's been learning SO much and it's amazing to watch her as her mind makes connections between words and letters and sounds. She can sound a lot of words out and knows a lot of sight words. It really is amazing to watch her learn.
--I took a picture of her on her very last day of being 4 with the license plate of our mini-van which is 4LP = Four, Lydia Peaden. The picture with the Paw Patrol shirt is on her 5th birthday.
--I feel more and more grateful for this sweet girl every day. Our relationship is turning into something very special. I was talking to a lady recently who is the oldest in her family and only has brothers and she was talking about how special her relationship with her mom is. Obviously, I would love for Lydia to have a sister because my sisters are so special to me - but I'm absolutely enjoying being the girls of the family together. I adore her more than words can adequately express and even though I'm not nearly as good of a mom as I want to be, she is kind and forgiving and is helping me be better every day. I pray every night that I can be the kind of mom that she deserves.
Happy Birthday my Lydia-girl. We all love you are are so grateful that you are a part of our family!
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