March & we have a new child

It seems every week, we see a major transition in Alison. Not that we don't recognize her anymore . She has a funny sense of humor and loves to tease. I love to hear her laugh. I love the look she gives me when Lynn teases her and she gives me that knowing smile... you know like we are in it together.

We are not watching the Chinese movies I bought in China. I picked up a bunch of movies and some have Cantonese and Mandarin as options plus other languages that I don't know what they are because I can't read what it says. Anyway, we haven't watched a movie in Chinese in about two weeks. Of course if you let her, the choice is always "High School Musical" now. We have been watching "Super Why" and "Ni Hao, Kai-lan" on TV after school. I tape them and we watch them when she gets home. She is really funny with Kai-lan, she says everything they say in Chinese. Lynn and I repeat the Chinese too and she giggles and shakes her head over our pronunciation.

I took her spelling words and looked them up on a website that teaches Mandarin. It is amazing when you see all the Chinese words for "left". I picked the one I thought was the most obvious for the sentence the teacher will use to ask the kids to spell the word. Anyway, I copied the Chinese characters and then the pinyin. So, three columns... spelling word.... Chinese character...pinyin. Maybe this isn't helping her but most spelling words are very abstract. I just wanted to give her something she could review as she writes her spelling words. In church, she wrote all three columns out and seemed to be reading the Chinese.

She has beautiful handwriting. I think at this point she is just trying to memorize everything. She knows the alphabet and can write it. She recognizes the letters and can pick them out on the computer keyboard as I tell her what to write. She loves crafts. She will draw and cut out just about anything. She is an audio learner. She loves to sing and it something is put to music, she is repeating it very quickly.

Alison was looking around my sewing room on Friday and was very excited to see a small set of tools in a drawer (I use them on my sewing machines). She tried to take something apart with a screwdriver but I asked her to put the screwdriver up. Well, on Sunday morning she had the screwdriver out and had taken her cheap music phone apart (it was working before she took it apart). She broke both wires so of course it isn't fixable. She was very sad that it was broken and Lynn couldn't easily fix it. She needs to learn that you don't take things apart. When we wonder where she is when she is out of our sight, either Lynn or I will make a comment about her upstairs taking apart my quilting machine. Now that would not be funny.

On Sunday, she got on her bicycle like she knew what she was doing. Well, she knows how to pedal and she knows how to fall off. She could go about 4-6 pedals of the bike and seem to "have it" and then fall over. We need to go to a large parking lot with no traffic to work on this again. Then later that day, she put on in-line skates. Again, she falls really good. She was very patient and wasn't afraid to fall and she would get up over and over to try it again. She finally got to a point where she wasn't doing too bad and could go a ways before she fell.

Alison is still so shy. She is making up with a few people but not many. She is also very stubborn and no, she is not talking. She is understanding but not speaking unless forced. We are gong on spring break with Michelle and Alyssa. I think that will be our major communication breakthrough. I think talking to Alyssa will become pretty natural once they are together for a week.