This week is birthday week for Buggle and Mouse! He’ll turn 6 on Wednesday and she will be 5 on Friday. That’s right they are a year and a day apart except in a leap year! Suddenly I will only have one preschooler instead of several!
I can see the changes already- not just the ability to read and do math, but there are shifts in maturity and interests. Their world is broadening and they are changing to accommodate their new bigger world.
One place I see this is in the choice of reading materials. Both of them will still read picture books, but they are more and more inclined to tackle chapter books. Mouse still prefers fiction and poetry but Buggle happily reads non-fiction, biography, science, the cereal box and whatever else he can see!
Both of them have taken the training wheels off of their bikes and spend many hours a day zooming from the backyard down the alley, around on the cul-de-sac in front of the house and back. Buggle has started to develop “bike tricks” including putting his foot up on the seat while riding in order to tighten his sneaker strap! We have a couple of neighbors who mountain and/or BMX bike and he is very impressed by their skills and is trying to learn how to do similar things.
His great desire for a birthday present is a lawn mower so that he can learn to mow lawns. I have promised to look for one on craigslist and supervise his learning to cut the yard next door- no grass survives the activities on our backyard! He is quite tall and strong for his age and very safety conscious, so I think he can probably manage a mower in a very flat yard.
Mouse continues to say that she is going to be “a doctor that works on arms and legs”. She recently strung pink ribbons through the leg bones of the skeleton in her room on the grounds that it wanted to be pretty! She still struggles with staying at tasks that she considers “boring” but does better than she used to.
It seems very strange to me to have “big” children and not just toddlers, preschoolers and infants. Many older mothers have told me that the preschool years go by in a flash and I see that it’s true. I’m missing their littleness a bit but looking forward to their increasing maturity and broadening horizons!