Dear Santa,
I hope you have a wonderful Christmas. What i want for Christmas is a webkins reindeer and a webkins poodle and i would like a bratz kid. Merry Christmas.
Your friend, Katelyn.
Dear Santa. From Katelyn.
How are your reinDeer? I am Being good. Emma is being bad. But i love her anyways. Give me toys. please.
to Santa. I love you Santa.
A recent phone conversation with “BePaw”. That is what Emma calls my dad as she can’t quite say Grandpa yet. She loves to “tawk” on the “fome”! She often just squeals at BePaw or giggles. It is so funny to watch her. She will try to feed fritos to the phone or kiss and give it “huggys”.
I have been able to actually get her to keep these kind of hair bands in her hair. I have to divide it so that she can’t get her fingers under the hair to pull it out. I am just happy that we figured out something that is Emma-proof so that we can grow out her bangs. She even takes naps with them in and they stay put.
I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but Emma has had quite the run of ear infections lately. She is on her 4th one, only this last one is in her left instead of her right. She has previously failed either one or both of her ears on every hearing test when Erin, our Early On coordinator comes to visit. This past week, she finally passed on the right, but failed on the left. Good news is, she has now passed in both ears at some point. The bad news is, it was her 4th ear infection. Because of the constant fluid/infections, we are going to visit the ENT after the new year. She will most likely be going in for tubes. I think the tubes will really make her speech come clearer as she won’t be hearing as if she were under water. Her speech has really exploded lately, with her putting 3 words together and still mimicking just about anything we say. My recent favorites being: “Me hewp you”, “No, no, no, no, no” (yes all of them at once!), “Emma do it” & “ackdonawds” (McDonalds--thanks to Katelyn). You can hear in the back seat of our car: “Emma, do you want Kentucky Fried or McDonalds?”---- “ackdonawds”. Funny, but she says that for every choice.
Another recent funny story from when Erin was here: Emma had gotten a sticker from her hearing test, and at some point she had put it on Erin’s shirt. When Erin went to put her coat on, Emma went up to her and pulled her zipper down. At first I thought she was just playing with it as she really has a fascination with zippers. Before I knew it, she had pulled Erin’s coat open, reached in and grabbed her sticker, and then zipped her coat back up. We both just cracked up laughing. Erin said that made her day and she was going to share that with her co-workers.
Mei-mei has a vision screening coming up as well. We had her tested at the Kentucky State fair this past fall, and they said that she could possibly have refraction errors. It has taken about 4 months to even get in to see the opthamologist. I hope she is worth the wait as she was highly recommended. Erin has noticed that Emma is “over-shooting” a bit when she goes to place the little people in the house or when she puts a piece in a puzzle. I have noticed that she will often be on top of something such as the couch or the table and then run right into it. Now that could possibly just be part of being a toddler, but I am glad we are having it checked out just in case.
Needless to say, she is a fun, busy girl and I am incredibly blessed to be her Ma-ma!
Katelyn had her first “real” Christmas program at church this year. All of the kids did an awesome job and I was super impressed. They had several songs with a lot of words and they sounded great. Katelyn was very excited to have her Grandpa, Nana, and Jack-jack up to see her play Mary. She really enjoyed the weekend with them and loved that they could see her do her part.
She also had an animal research project due at school that next Monday, so it was nice to have a little extra help for that too. She did hers on the panda, which worked out good since she could share how she saw the pandas in China. I need to take a picture of her “vest” that she made for her oral report. It was pretty cute.
Her teacher said at the parent-teacher conference that she is doing really well in school. She also said that she is a nice girl and that she enjoyed having her in her class. To us, that is just as important as the academics!
This week she had her 1st grade choir concert at school. Although at first we weren’t sure about the songs when the music teacher sent the words home, we did end up really appreciating and enjoying the theme, “Christmas is a Rainbow.” It was refreshing to hear a play on how we should accept everyone regardless of their color, especially in our small town where the majority of people are Caucasian. It is more personal to us now that we have a daughter of Asian descent. It is like a paradigm shift for our family in many ways, and I am so thankful for the new outlook it has given me towards other people of color. Katelyn did a great job singing her heart out once again. It really comes easy for her, and she LOVES to sing. Josh and I always joke that maybe she can grow up to be a singer and we will be her managers!
Katelyn “the elf” is counting down the days until Christmas. It is coming upon us fast!!
