Dear Gwen,
Today you are ninety-nine months old.
Summer is in full swing and we have had a lot of adventures,
with more on the way. You kicked off your summer vacation with your Gramma
Karen and Grandpa Keith, who picked you up on the last day of school and took
you for a sleepover and a day of fun in Nanoose and Parksville, including a
game of mini-golf where you got a hole in one! As always with your
grandparents, you had a great time. The day after that was Canada Day, for
which we drove down to Chemainus and took in the festivities there. The weather
wasn’t great, but you had a wonderful time: you got your face painted and then
had a caricature drawn of you, rode a pony and danced onstage with a terrific
band.
Most of your summer will be spent at the Girls Get Active
summer camp, which is a good fit for you. When they say “active”, they mean it!
A typical day might include field games, a craft, and an out-trip of some kind.
They keep all the kids very busy with a wide range of activities, and you come
home tired and ready to relax for the rest of the evening. (Yesterday, you came
home and read for a straight hour while you waited for dinner to be ready, even
turning down an invitation from a friend to meet at the playground because
“I’ve had enough of outside for today”.) I’ve also noticed that you are eating
a lot more, at least during the day while you’re at camp. I usually pack just
four items in your school lunch, but in your camp lunch you will happily eat
six or eight! I’m not sure if this is purely because you’re using so much more
energy, or if the fact that you have more than fifteen minutes to eat has
something to do with it – but either way, I’m glad you’re getting those
calories in.
Your end-of-year report card was terrific, which is no
surprise. One example is that you started the year with a “2” (Approaching
Expectations – they used to call it Needs Improvement in my day) in “Works and
plays cooperatively with others”. You ended the year with a “4” (Exceeding
Expectations). That’s huge progress! You also got 4s in Reading (duh), Oral
Language, Mathematics, Self-Confidence, and Independent Work. That’s amazing! I
think you tend to believe that your ADHD brain holds you back a lot more than
it actually does. We had a great time looking through your “Special Work”
folder for the year, seeing all the awesome examples of your work. Your diagram
of “How to Have a Good Day at School” was especially great, and it amused me
enormously to see “Read other books by Gwen B!” on the back of a story
you’d written.
 |
| Left: If You Give an Octopus Some Oatmeal, by Gwen. Right: Read more books by Gwen B.! If You Give a Meerkat Some Milk If You Give a Butterfly a Burger |
It’s wonderful to see that you are more willing to write
than you have been in the past. You’ve always had loads of wonderful ideas and
stories to share, but were frustrated by the process of writing them down. I
don’t know what’s caused the shift, but I’m happy about it! You are
participating in the library’s summer reading club, as usual, and in addition
this year I have put YOU in charge of writing down the books you read in your
book log. No one else needs to read the log, so it’s entirely appropriate to be
self-monitored; and you read more than one book a day, so you never lack for
something to write down, and have no temptation to “cheat”. (In fact I doubt
that idea would even occur to you.) For the past two weeks, you and I have made
a Sunday afternoon trip to the library to load up with books and stamp your
book log – your reading continues to be an enormous part of your life, and we
are finally at the point where you choose to read chapter books more often than
storybooks. Most joyously of all, you and I have started reading the Chronicles
of Narnia as our bedtime story. We just finished the first in the series, The
Magician’s Nephew, which ends with a number of elements that link to the most
famous one in the series, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. You have seen
the movie of that second book, and even read at least part of it in school last
year; it was AMAZING to watch your realizations about how the stories link, and
are all part of a bigger story, as we finished the Magician’s Nephew. I’m so
excited to continue reading these books with you!
For the second year in a row, you got to participate in
Grandkids University, this time with my mom, your Grannie Maureen. The two of
you signed up for “Creating, Baking, and Tasting …. Oh My!”, otherwise known as
“Baking”, for your major. You made blueberry-cranberry-lemon loaf, almond
crescent cookies that I was COMPLETELY unable to stop eating, burger buns on
which you got to eat burgers for lunch on the second day, and a lemon meringue
pie. You also got to participate in the fun afternoon activities, such as
getting your hair coloured by the Hairdressing students, playing in the gym
with the other kids, and eating pizza and chips. It was a very successful and
fun two days - Grandkids U is such a cool, unique program, and I’m pretty proud
of our institution for putting it on every year!
One of the fun summer activities I had planned for us turned
into a flop. We were all looking forward to the big-screen outdoor movie event
put on every summer by Coastal Community Credit Union. We’ve gone to one of
these every year, seeing The Croods, Rio, Big Hero Six, The Lego Movie … this
year, they were showing The Jungle Book in Nanaimo, which I thought would be
too scary for you, so we decided to drive to Duncan to see Zootopia. Well, who
could have predicted that we would have to quickly exit the park, in the
pitch-black, picking our way through the “rows” of lawn chairs and air
mattresses, about half an hour before the movie’s end, because you were too
terrified to watch any more? I guess now that we’ve had to leave big-screen
Disney movies more than once, we are going to have to start pre-screening them
for you. Your dad is quick to point out that the environment – the enormous
screen, the outdoor park, the being surrounded by strangers – may have added
more fear to a sequence about jungle animals going “savage” and attacking other
animals than you may have experienced if we’d watched it at home. This makes
sense, but I will never be able to wrap my mind around the fact that you would
happily watch 9 and The Nightmare Before Christmas on a daily basis, while
other films and TV shows that seem totally innocuous cause you to freak right
the heck out. I’m reminded of that one episode of Arthur the Aardvark, and that
other episode of Peg + Cat, as well as the most recent outing to Zootopia.
One more thing I must write about before ending this
newsletter – a couple of weekends ago, we went as a family to a barbecue hosted
at a friend’s house for the entire department of Dad’s coworkers. You know a
few of them, because they are our friends – Johnny and Tami, Eric and Arwen –
but mostly they are all strangers. And most importantly, there are a lot of
them, and they are all adults, and because of the weather everyone was hanging
out inside instead of out in the yard, so it was an intense and crowded
situation for anyone, not just a kid. I figured we would stay for an hour, then
you and I would go home, letting Dad stick around to hang out with his
colleagues as long as he liked. Well, you surprised us. We brought along one of
your favourite activities, the sketchbook and stencil set where you get to
design clothes, hairstyles, and makeup for the figures already drawn on the
pages. You quite happily sat at the table in the middle of this loud, enormous
crowd, and entertained yourself with it for nearly two hours. Not only that –
after dinner, when dessert was served, you were quite confident to work your
way through the crowd and fetch your own dessert, turning down my offer of
help. We ended up staying at the party for nearly three hours in total: you
tried new foods, interacted appropriately with those around you, and seemed
happy and content to be there. We have NEVER seen you display that kind of
comfort and confidence in that environment before – it was amazing!
Well, that’s it for this month, my Gwen. As always, I love
you a million, billion, kajillion, and EIGHT, and I’m looking forward to the
rest of our summer adventures together!
Love,
Mom
Mom
