What's Maia Up To Day

Maia is 5.25 years old this month and chugging along happily in school. She likes cats the most and bunnies the second most, and is always wearing some kind of headband with animal ears or crowns on it.

She gets up after 6:30 AM for school (bus at 7) and arrives home at 2:30 PM. Rebecca and Ian walk her out in the morning, and then we all pick her up at the bus stop. She doesn't do much "quiet time" anymore except on the weekends. We still try to get her to bed around 7 and she's usually asleep by 9. Unfortunately, the early wake-up has made the weekends longer since she can no longer force herself to sleep late into the morning.

I love exploring her room after she's been playing to see the things she's drawn and the imagination games she's played. Once, I found a blue purse full of broken chunks of clay and flat Duplo pieces -- she was pretending to be Mirabel Madrigal and discovering a vision buried in her room. Another time, there was a big box of Duplos (only green) behind the chair -- this was her litter box when she was a cat.

She has a surfeit of toys, games, and activities to play with now, such that she's rarely bored of doing any 1 of them and always feels like she needs more time to enjoy everything life has to offer. For her afternoons, we'll rotate through sports/biking outside, pretend games, drawing, puzzles, Khan Academy Kids on the iPad, Switch games, or PC games (Contraption Maker or Stray).

We don't know a whole lot about what she does at school because, like every kid, she doesn't want to talk about the school day after just having lived through it. She has a Chromebook assigned to her that stays at school but she says they just use the computers for games. I showed her the ancient "Luigi's Mansion" game series on the 3DS last weekend and she said she'd already seen it before in one of her "Brain Breaks" at school. "Brain Breaks" are not on the Chromebook -- it's some TV-based physical activity where they have to move around. All we really know about school is that she earns at least 3 "Dojo points" from her teacher every day for things like working hard, participating, or being a champion. This gamification of school is visible through a mobile app that constantly bugs you to upgrade to "Dojo Premium" (we have not).

Maia has a pretty nice life and routine at the moment. She enjoys her weekly three hours with the babysitter (in our own house), will involve Ian in her games without much complaining, and enjoys jokes and farts. She still raises her hand to interject in a conversation, an amazing habit instilled at Kids Under Construction preschool last year.

Currently, she wants to be a jellyfish for Halloween.

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