Gosh, I started this last night before I took Julia up to bed, but then I fell asleep, probably before Julia, while I was waiting for Julia to fall asleep.
Julia and I are having a great time this week. She is continuing to do letter work each day in our summer room. She does a lot of drawing and coloring as well as writing the day's letter, tracing over words and trying to copy the words on a second line. Her copying is pretty awful right now, but she is definitely trying so I am sure she will get it. We also hang a big letter on the walls and some of those need to be painted. Julia is into the painting. We make a puzzle piece of the letter, cheer the putnik cheers, and finally write the letter of the day on the window with special window paint. Throughout the day, we do the putnik cheers and/or finger spell the letters with their sounds. We even sounded out a few simple words today. I knew she had seen or done some of this before. She understood what I was doing right away -- she couldn't take the initiative to do it, but she followed me.
This afternoon, we went to the kids' dentist for Julia's check up. Her behavior at her last check up (the second time she saw a dentist but the first real check up with x-rays and cleaning of the teeth) was none too good. She still had no idea what was going on and had no reason to trust the people who were examining her. I think that she probably did not have enough English to really understand what was going on. Now, she does. Yahoo! She wanted to know what all the instruments are and was not at all crazy about having the little sharp hook tool put into her mouth. She was willing to open her mouth and have her teeth touched, scraped, and then cleaned. I held her hands but I did not have to keep them down, we just held hands. Such progress, I was very please and proud.
Something that concerns us -- more David than me, but me too -- is how Julia bounces from topic to topic when she speaks. Last night, on our evening walk, we saw one of our neighbors who has a daughter who is Julia's age. Julia has tried saying hello to this little girl a number of times with the girl giving any response. Shy? I am not sure -- I see that she is also not forgiving of Julia's differences. Julia tried to tell this child not to hit her brother with pillows and when she got no answer from the girl, Julia then started talking -- not in perfect sentences -- about dinosaurs, and then about characters in her favorites movies. The little girl did not try to understand or respond at all. We smiled at the mom and urged Julia to move on to walk by the Bay.
My question is whether Julia is just trying very hard to connect or is it something else -- some inability to stay on one topic or something else? Julia is so outgoing and so fearless when it comes to talking to people. This endears her to lots of patient grownups and I believe that this impulse is helping her English learning, but what about kids?? I remember Cheshire at about Julia's age being very much into a standard way of doing things -- life was pretty much black and white for her. But I think that I could have encouraged her to play with the little Chinese girl down the street, I think she might have asked questions but I think, no I know, that she would have thought it was cool and would have been a help. Oh, I guess all kids are not like that. It would be SO easy if this little girl was a friend.
Our lakes and bay was very swollen with all the rains. Julia loves to look for dead fish after she found that one dried and semi-eaten skelton last month. So, we were looking for some dead fish along the Bay and we saw a very large dead fish -- no fish tale here! It was at least two feet long! Julia decided that it was Uck! and Gross!, and repeated her find and her opinion of the find all the way home.
As a side note, Latkah slipped into the Bay and was totally embarrassed. She just got a little too close and the grass was very wet. After a lot of shaking herself off and a bath as soon as she got home, she seemed to recover. But we did laugh at her. I am usually holding Julia back when I see her getting too close to the edge. Do I have to do the same with the dog? LOL.
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