Maia Year 5 Month 6 Battle Report

Maia is now five and a half, and halfway through kindergarten.

She had a little growth spurt recently but is still deceptively small for her age. She is just big enough to pedal the Princess bike she got two Christmases ago (but can zoom around on her little yellow balance bike without fear). Whenever the weather is warm enough, we head out into the court with a bike or scooter (and a lawn mower for Ian) and wait for the other kids on the street to join us (7 just across the court and a few more more than 3 houses away).

Her memory is still excellent. We started reading Sherman's Lagoon together in the Sunday paper back during the pandemic and I got her a cartoon anthology book for Christmas. On her own, she recognized one of the very first Sunday comics from 2020 and said, "We saw this in the paper!" Reading mode has also clicked on in her brain -- she got a joke book from the Ahlbins at Christmastime and immediately started reading the jokes out loud, spelling out words that she didn't know. She also got a "touch the stylus" Learning Globe from the grandparents and likes to recite world facts to us throughout the day. She parrots the Globe's description back in their entirety, like the African volcano "in a constant state of eruption".

She loves school and does a pretty good job of getting to the 7 AM bus without drama. The gamification "Dojo points" seem to have slowed down now that the year is progressing, but she's still learning a lot of letters and numbers and watching way more TV in class than I ever did outside of 12th grade English. Her current favourite is a show called Numberblocks and she likes to tell us what all of the different numbers sound like on the show.

Most of her imagination games either involve cats or her real-world surroundings. Bunnies are less relevant these days and she actually went on our Christmas trip without Original Bunny (he stayed home to play with her Globe along with Hopsy the biggest bunny in the house). This weekend alone, she played Ornament Store, made a Smores fire out of pipe cleaners, played several rounds of The Great British Baking Show, and built a Minecraft world out of Duplo blocks.

Random favourites: pink and purple, the Learning Globe, her new stuffed cat, any kind of dessert, corned beef, black olives, Encanto, Mario Kart 8