Mattea - Winter update

Here are some pics of Mattea over the past couple months. As of January 10th, she will be 3.5 but seems like she is a whole lot older with all her "wisdom". Lol...she is still as talkative as ever (not sure where she gets that from?:-P) and has the ability to cleverly manipulate her younger sister - typically so smoothly that the poor younger one doesn't even know she's been "had". Lol...

Her latest news is that she can READ! We started "reading lessons" at the end of September, and she is now reading quite well!!! She is on lesson 79 of "Teach your Child to Read in 100 easy lessons" (thanks Chantelle for the reminder about the book!). Its been great for her. She had memorized the sounds of each letter at 2.5 yrs old, so she was more than ready to tackle something new! The book teaches to read phonetically, which was right up her alley! She is great at sounding things out and is amazing us at what she can do! She is able to read Dr. Suess books (Hop on Pop etc) quite easily, and I've picked up a bunch of other early readers that she is working through. At the end of the 100 lessons, the book says the child will be reading at a Gr. 2 level...and although I don't think Mattea will read quite as fast as an older child would, we are still super proud of her!

Now we have to be careful about spelling words around her...she's catching on quick!!! She will go quiet for a minute, and then go...P-O-P says pop! I want some too!

One of her cute quotes recently was told to me by her Sunday school teacher...The teachers of the class wanted to hear a particular solo during the Christmas choir concert, so they let the class come into the hallway as long as they promised not to talk....while listening to the female vocalist, her teacher whispered to the class..."Doesn't she sounds so beautiful?", to which Mattea replied, "Oh yes! Why, she sounds just like my mother!"
Awww:-) At least I would have one person voting for me if I ever audition for Canadian Idol:-P

Gotta love the bedhead:-D and she LOVED opening her Advent each day. She loved getting the surprises and doing all the activities...her favourite one was "Go for a drive to see the Christmas lights" She made us use this one over and over;-)

 Doing some "JK" work. We are focusing on learning to write now. I had tried before, but she didn't seem to have the fine motor skills to do it well, but then in early December she surprised me by writing out her name all by herself! She paused when she came to the "e" and then realizing she didn't know how to print a lowercase e, she did a capital E instead:-) So time to teach her the right way to write an e:-)

 and in terms of size..she will have a Dr's appt soon which will give the official numbers, but on our scale she is 39.5 lbs and I think she is around 42-43 inches tall? All I know is that she is in size 5 clothes and they seem to fit her perfectly