5.25

This is the face of a child who is totally killing it in kindergarten.  We really just hoped Ingrid would enjoy school, and expected her to produce reams of artwork and make one good friend, which was her M.O. from three previous schools.  But she's flourishing all around.

Ingrid has a big gang of girlfriends from school and the neighborhood.  She still loves "the new neighbors" next door and goes to find them nearly every day after school.  Her best friend from kindergarten happens to live down the block, so we see her all the time too.  Then there are half a dozen other friends from her current class and her old preschool that we arrange dates with on a regular basis.  The girls are so easy together -- with Ingrid's friends, 1 + 1 = 0.2 in terms of parenting effort required.  And that 0.2 is mostly producing snacks.

She is also learning loads of new things at school.  I think our school is a little pushy on the reading and math in kindergarten and first grade, and we told her teacher at the first conference that we don't really care about academic benchmarks at this age as long as the kid is engaged and happy.  We expected Ingrid to gravitate toward the art materials and toys and cheerfully ignore most of the academic instruction.  But she's totally into her letters and numbers!  Her teacher is really wonderful and must be making it a lot of fun.  Ingrid now knows about a dozen sight words and is starting to piece together sounds for simple words that she already knows, which is a lot of words, because she has memorized verbatim the entire Mo Willems library.  She likes to do the refrigerator magnets, instructing Heidi on the letter sounds and spelling words with moderate adult assistance. 

Truth

She tells us she plans to spend all summer reading in a hammock in the secret garden feature of our new landscaping.  That's a child after my own heart.

If she's alone at home, she usually colors at the kitchen table, reads books to invisible audiences, or dresses the baby dolls.  She loved helping me holidazzle the house and making paper snowflakes to hang on the window.  Her ability to focus remains incredible (remember this?).

It's good that she entertains herself well, because she has no interest in organized activities or lessons.  She stuck with soccer for the six-week season because her neighbor buddy was in it.  But she's totally over the ballet class, and when Ingrid decides something, Ingrid decides something.  This was an awesome trait when she decided to potty train herself at 18 months.  Not so awesome if I'm trying to get her to put the leotard on and she doesn't want to do it.  So we've un-enrolled from ballet.  Oh well.  She's five.  It's one less weekly driving errand for Grandma.

Her current sartorial style involves a lot of pattern-mixing, skirts with leggings and shirts instead of dresses, and lots of accessories.  Sometimes she puts accessories on her accessories.

Ingrid is intermittently awesome with Heidi.  The kids have been talking a lot about shuffling the bedrooms and having girls' room/boys' room.  Ingrid and Heidi both seem excited about this and spend a lot of time discussing what their room will look like (there will be rainbows).  I'll be sad when the two big kids don't share a room anymore.  It was really, really good for them and made them much closer than boy/girl siblings usually are.  But Ingrid and Heidi are more in the same zone in terms of schedule and bedtime reading material, so it makes sense to move them together in the next few months.  Query whether they can get along well enough to share space.  Hopefully it will be good for them like it was good for Henry and Ingrid.

I foresee a lot of girls-ganging-up-on-Henry.

She swoops in to cuddle Fritz when he least expects/desires it.

If we have to have words with Ingrid, it's usually at mealtimes, when she refuses to eat anything of nutritional value.  But mostly she has been quite delightful lately, with lots of cuddles and sincere I love yous.  It's a good time for our little lady.