Petra's skills

Petra has been making real strides lately in transitioning to being more of a Big Kid. She’s still doing some babyish things–a resurgence in meltdowns, a pretty intense potty regression–but her skills are leaping ahead.

She wants to do everything Silas does, of course. He’s reading a bit these days, and she loves to pick up a book and sit next to him while he’s sounding out words. She wants to say what he’s saying, but she doesn’t understand it, so she says, “TTTTTAAAAAAWWWWWWSSSSSBBBBB” or whatever random letters come to mind. Which, of course, makes it harder for him. But it’s so cute, I just can’t make her stop it.

Her drawings are starting to look more deliberate and less scribbles-y. Yesterday, I found a picture that I thought maybe Silas had drawn–it didn’t look quite like his usual stuff, but there were defined features of a body, arms, and head. When I asked him about it, he said, “Petra said she was drawing a tall monster,” and that’s exactly what it was.

She’s the puzzle queen around here.

A few weeks ago, Silas’ friend Noah came over to play. He brought some puzzles to share, which I suppose he imagined doing with Silas. Petra did one of them (48 pieces!) all by herself–having never seen it before, and not really understanding how to look at the picture on the box to figure it out–before she would relinquish it to the boys.

She’s obsessed with putting collections of things into bags and carrying them around that way. JC’s mom pointed out that she did this with a ziplock bag at Christmas, so it’s been going on longer than I thought. Maybe since Halloween? It just cracks me up. She claims any bag as her own, and fills it to the brim.

She recently started making “sets” with the contents of the bags, modeled after Silas.

I’m so excited about her ability to create what she wants in the world and be happy with it. She went through a long period of frustration where she would describe what she wanted to build or draw to me, and then get very frustrated when I didn’t execute it perfectly. This is much better.