Patty Cakes: Olive Lately

What has happened to the rest of November? I don't know how it is December! I have not been blogging as much as usual. Olive being in school everyday has been a huge adjustment. Our days feel so busy. With homework and practicing sometimes it feels like we are barely scrapping by. The other day a friend asked me if there was anything we could give up to make life less chaotic and I honestly couldn't figure out one thing. Part of the extra craziness is the speech and occupational therapy Olive is doing. They require working on lots of things at home and it is pretty time consuming. Since they are both minor issues I am thinking that it will only be for this year. She's been making huge progress and working really hard. But, they definitely add another element to the schedule.

Olive is loving Kindergarten. She is just thriving. She has had some new learning experiences with the other kids in her class. One kids told her that when she wrote her 10's they looked terrible. Then for about 3 or 4 days Olive was asking me to give her candy and she needed to bring it to school. After a few days of saying no I finally asked her "Why do you need to bring candy to school? I don't think that's allowed" and that's when she said, " Cassie said she won 't be my friend unless I bring her candy". My heart broke a little bit.

There have been some positive friend experiences. She has already made lots of friends and even been invited to some friend's birthday parties. I consider that a great accomplishment considering she started school not know one other person. Olive has always been a sweet and tender girl and it's been eye opening to her that other kids aren't always good listeners. She always tells me what things they got to do at school and if anyone couldn't do it because they got "clipped down." There was one boy in particular that gets in trouble often and she tells me about him sometimes since he sits at her table. One day as we were driving in the car, randomly, she says to me "I will always be nice to Bryce because he doesn't have any friends". It was such a cute moment.

At her parent teacher conferences last month her teacher had nothing but good things to say about her. Olive got "E"on everything. The only place that she is struggling is with handwriting but we already knew that and have been doing a handwriting curriculum at home. We felt like that teacher was a little bit vague about her feedback but everything was very positive.

Olive has really matured in these last few months. I sometimes look at her and can't believe who this big 5 year old before me. Olive started piano in September and has been doing great at it. She is so good about practicing and has made great progress in a short time because of her dedication. One month she even won a contest for most minutes practiced and she was so proud of herself.

I think it is common to have some anxiety's develop at this age. They world is opened up so much and they kinda learn that scary things can happen. Olive has been really nervous about car accidents and cars crashing. We have to constantly reassure her that Mom and Dad are very safe drivers. I don't know what else to do about that one! At school they had a fire drill that they didn't warn the class about. It caught her very off guard and she was really frightened. Now every night she is worried about smoke alarms and if they are working and fires and if she hears beeping sounds and lots of other concerns that she comes out of bed a million times to tell us about.

One of her biggest accomplishments recently was her Reflections entries. I have heard lot of positive experiences from Becca about Reflections and she told us to enter her in as many categories as possible. So Olive did a painting, a photo, and a dance. Her dance was the cutest thing ever, but we knew it was just a "kindergarten" dance. She made up all the moves and the music. We were surprised when at the award party they played a clip of it, (probably because she was so adorable). For her Visual Art she did an oil painting on canvas of a beach scene. The theme this year was Believe, Dream, Inspire. The title of her beach scene at first was, My Masterpiece. After lots of discussion we convinced her to name it something that explained it more. So she decided on I Dream of the Beach. Her photo was again, all her idea. She wanted to take a picture of her dance clothes. Since she was a Kindergartener she was in the "primary" category and was competing with 1st and 2nd graders. We had no expectations about her entries and just did it for the experience and fun. She won two certificates of Merit (participation) for her dance and her painting. We were so surprised when she also won a certificate of Excellence for her photo! It is going on to the regional competition. She was so excited and proud of herself. It was a big, important day in her little life. We couldn't have been prouder.