it's becoming pointless for Jonathan and I to spell out words like CANDY and SEX at our house

Julianna has begun learning to read.  She can read simple words like cat, car, dog, bat, and dad.  I used to think it was from memorizing them, but now I know that she is actually sounding them out.  We've been reading The Magic Tree House books and last night she sounded out "Day of the Dragon King" and "Earthquake in Early Morning."  We finished reading Pippi Longstocking a week ago and I'm not sure what we'll do next.

My cousin has older children and about six months ago she gave us a bunch of their old flash cards.  Well, Julianna absolutely LOVED them.  She would sit in the floor for HOURS and play with these cards.  Eventually she lost interest in them, but she definitely has continued interest in reading.  I try to make a weekly trip to the library but it doesn't always happen.

Of course it helps that we have regular spelling bees.

She has been able to read both upper and lowercase letters for a long, long time and she is showing great effort in sounding words out now.  I love the fact that whenever we read a chapter out of one of her books she begs us to read another right away.  The excitement that she shows couldn't make me a happier mama.

Here's a really old video of her practicing reading.



Untitled from c525600 on Vimeo.

Last night she wrote Joshua's name on his Happy Meal pail for trick-or-treating.  She leaves me notes all the time that have a bunch of letters on them.  She writes the first couple of letters for each word until she can't figure out any more and then she goes to the next word.

She got really sick one night last week (of course, last week because I needed one. more. thing.) and she threw up in the middle of the night.  She thought she had lost her tooth when she was vomiting but fortunately it hadn't fallen out yet.  Anyway, she left me this hilarious note on a post-it on my desk at work the next day when she came to school with me for a teacher work day.  It said, "MRSTUCKER I FT MY T C E L N B I D" which translates to "Mrs. Tucker, I thought my tooth came out last night but it didn't."

That's a post-it note I'll probably keep forever.