When I picked up Zoe from school on Friday, she was laughing and joking with one of her little classmates. As I watched the two of them through the window I couldn’t help but think how *big* Zoe looked and acted – it was if I was picking up a teenager! Indeed, she is way more mature than ever before.

Among Zoe’s favorite things these past few months: playing school (she’s always the teacher, of course), playing with or throwing Hippo elaborate birthday parties, drawing (“I’m going to be an artist,” she often tells us), making houses and other objects with her ABC/123 Lego set, playing hide-and-seek (often with her sister), dancing and performing little schools (which she also does at school), filling up and running around the house with bags, and being “swung” (I take her arms, Q takes her legs) into bed at night. She is very social – “Will you play with me?” she often asks me or Q – but she has also become more interested in being by herself at times. (“I need alone time,” she’ll declare, before instructing people – especially Avery – to knock before entering her room.)

In terms of skills and developmental stuff, she has been able to write letters and her first and last name for some time now, and she can also spell/write numerous short words (e.g. cat, dog, love) and the names of family members and some friends. She’s always coming home from school with little pieces of paper (often party invitations) containing the names of her family: Mommy, Daddy, Avery, Zoe and (of course) Hippo. For the past several months, she has asked the meaning of words that she hears and doesn’t yet know. (“Mommy, what does ‘layering’ mean?”) In terms of her own words, she still mispronounces a few: yellow is (still) “lellow,” feet are “feets,” hospital is “hostelbull,” remember is “revember” and instead of saying “that’s where it is,” she’ll say “that’s where it bees.” She still likes math problems – she can do simple division and multiplication problems and she recently got down the concept of half (i.e. half of 10 is 5).

Some other milestones: She gave up sucking her thumb during the daytime at the beginning of the year (though she is having a tougher time giving it up at bedtime). And she officially gave up her daily nap in late March, though she still naps occasionally on the weekends.

In terms of personality, she is normally pretty happy and well-mannered. She has emerged as a bit of rule-follower (much like her mom!) – she’ll usually wait for me or Q to give the okay when she asks for something, for example. (“Did you say yes, Mommy?” she’ll ask me, and she often ask if it’s okay if she sucks her thumb – since she knows she’s not supposed to.) She is also really loving, often telling me, Q or Avery out of the blue that she loves us or saying things like “I’m going to love you forever,” or “I want to be with you always.” And she’s also sentimental – feeling sad after we get home from a trip, for example, and saying she wants to go back.

She is not, of course, an angel – she can be sassy and mean at times and though her tantrums are less frequent than they used to be, they do still happen. (She had one of her worst episodes ever just last month.) But yet, her bad moods (usually) don’t last long. You can often rationalize with her to calm her down and she’s known to do “do-overs” and apologize fairly soon after getting upset. “I love you all the time – even when I don’t listen to you,” she recently told me, after an awful blow-up.

As written here before, she’s a good big sister, looking out for Avery, comforting her at times (“Are you okay, sweetie?”) and alerting me or Q if she is upset or needs something. (“Avery’s awake – she’s crying!” she’ll tell us after her sister’s naptime.) She is quite patient with her – rarely getting that upset when Avery, for example, knocks down her toys. (When it kept happening one recent day, she just said, “Again??!”) But like any sister she does get irritated at times – usually lashing out by squeezing Avery’s face (something she knows that Avery dislikes). She also made me laugh last week when she said she didn’t want to take a bath with Avery that night, per me. “She is annoying to me,” she said.

In closing, I often tease Zoe by telling her how little she is. “No, I’m a big girl!” she’ll say in an insulted tone, and she likes to reminds me that she’s the biggest (i.e. tallest) in her class. Indeed, at her official half-year measurement this morning, she came in at 45 inches.

-M

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at 11:48 am and is filed under 58.Two kids-May 11. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.