Just Another July Week

 Claire

Since I am here with Claire every day I don't notice how amazingly smart she is becoming with communication, learning, and playing. I always encourage her to ask full sentence questions when she wants anything and mostly she is great with it unless she is in an upset state. She is learning new games from what she watches when we have TV time and she is starting to recognize most of the lowercase letters. I've now added trying to match pictures of what letters start with and I need to get more pictures than what is already on the flashcards we have. Her hand writing is still so immature but there is only room for improvement! She can also now draw her family without any help with a mommy, daddy, Claire, and Shay, and animals with their features like ears, legs, tails, etc. I had the random bright idea to make a paper airplane one day and it made them both so happy and Claire kept trying to teach Shay how to throw it properly since I showed her.

Shay

She has recently fallen in love with Frozen and sings "let it go, let it go" to tell me she wants to watch the movie, or at least that song so we can sing and dance together. It is most likely because we have a Frozen puzzle that we do so Claire can practice puzzle solving, even though she only does the faces while I do the rest. There are also several clothing items and some of our underwear that have Frozen, so they pretend to be princesses and Claire knows their names making it easier for Shay to be excited for it too. I feel like Shay is already so smart because she recognizes so many letters as I'm trying to teach Claire, and she understands so much. They both  love to help but Shay is always so insistent that I have to find some way for her to help like finding the right colors for building block birthday cakes. She is pretty good with communication but there are still some barriers when she can't say the word correctly and we have to guess until we hit the jack pot.

Friend

We have a new opportunity starting this week that I'm excited for, and it came about because of some random circumstances. My friend needed help watching her boy for a day while she worked and I was able to bring the girls with me to have a long play date. Now we have arranged that he can come play at our house with the girls for Monday and Tuesday while she is at work and it makes things easier for her and a good opportunity for us. I'm excited for the girls to have a friend over and Claire keeps saying 'yay thank you mommy' when I tell her he is coming to play tomorrow.  We might just be using the AC more to keep us all more comfortable if they will be playing and running around away from the fans I usually have going.