64 months

From 2014 October

Nicholas was feeling left out the other day when I was doing Elizabeth's 11 month pictures and wanted me to do his month picture too.  So here it is.  And that gives me a good reason to do an update post on him as well.  So a few updates on Nicholas:

• He loves kindergarten!  He plays school, writes the "morning message" on his dry erase board, "preps" class, and so on.
• His reading is amazing.  He overheard me saying that he reads at around a third grade level and so now tells people that.  I don't actually know what his official reading level is, but he can read books that I remember reading in the middle of elementary school with just a little stumbling.  And what really impresses me is how smoothly he reads, with attention to punctuation and voice, rather than just sounding out each word.
• He has started taking an interest in writing for the first time.  He has always hated writing and we had to force him to do it, but he now is willing to do it.  I think a big part of it is that he is now more willing to make up spellings by sounding out a word and not worry about whether it is correct.  For example, he is currently working on a Magic Treehouse story and he typed the following sentence this morning: "annie sed  Cumon  We   Hafe  to go to  the Tree  Hows  Kuz we Hafe to go on a misn"  Translation: "Annie said, "Come on, we have to go to the treehouse because we have to go on a mission."
• He is going through a phase where he often needs one of us in his room to fall asleep.  He asks for snuggles just about every night and about half of the nights he comes out after 30-45 minutes of trying to go to sleep and says he can't fall asleep and needs us.  If I go in he is out in 5 minutes.
• He cannot sit still.  He literally can't sit in his chair for all of dinner.
• He has very little internal monologue and must narrate everything.  This drives us insane but is probably why his verbal skills are so good.
• His behavior has improved dramatically since he started kindergarten.  He still occasionally has a meltdown, especially if he is exhausted or hungry, but they are much more rare.  And there are many times each week where we are just in awe of how responsible he is.
• He seems to alternate between being 3 and being 10.  Sometimes he wants to watch toddler shows on tv and other times he sits down at the computer to write a novel.
• He loves baseball and is very disappointed that the Os lost.

We have a conference with his teacher tomorrow (nothing bad, just the regular fall conference) so I'm curious to hear about what he is like at school.