Andrea’s Weblog

Elizabeth started pre-k in August. She loves her teacher, Miss Kim and is thrilled that her best friend Katie is in her class. She attends Open Door Preschool, a non-sectarian preschool that everyone raves about. It’s a 25 minute drive from home, so Elena and I usually find things to do so we don’t have to spend 2 hours of our day in the car.

Here’s a photo of her first day, both looking a bit wary:

Elena and Elizabeth are very close, so you can imagine how disappointed she was when Elizabeth went off on an adventure without her:

The McPherson Family is pleased to announce that Elizabeth McPherson has been promoted to official dishwasher’s assistant. After several years serving as the official animal feeder, undertaking the responsibility of feeding two cats and a dog, her superiors feel she has shown the initiative necessary for the increased responsibility. Elizabeth will begin transition from Official Animal Feeder to Assistant Dishwasher effective immediately. Elizabeth will study under Frank McPherson, Head Dishwasher (among other titles).

Elizabeth will also undertake training an apprentice, Elena McPherson, who will gradually take over as the McPherson Family’s Official Animal Feeder. The transition is expected to go smoothly and there should be no disruption to daily operations. Also note that Elizabeth will maintain her position as McPherson Family Table Setter Extrordinaire.

A month afterward, I’m not quite at the point where I can talk much about it, but my dad passed away on May 29. He was living with Multiple Sclerosis and had an accident with his wheelchair. So, despite his illness, it was quite a shock. We rushed up to Maryland to be with my family.

I was very worried how Elizabeth would take it and if she could attend the funeral. She was such a trooper though. She seemed to understand that we were going up to say good-bye to grandpa’s body. Over the course of several days, she asked a lot of questions and seemed to get it sorted out in her head. Elizabeth will still talk about grandpa out of the blue and tell me how much she misses him.

I’m sad that Elena will never know her Grandpa Fricke. Since Frank’s dad passed away before Elizabeth was born, they never go to know him either. Luckily, they have an awesome Aunt and Uncle and wonderful grandmas to spoil them as their grandpas would expect.

Here’s my last photo of Elena with her grandpa.

After watching the musical Annie on the way home from St. Augustine, Elizabeth was inspired to “clean the whole house.” If any of you aren’t familiar with the story, Mrs. Hannigan has the orphans clean the entire orphanage on their hands and knees. Despite this daunting task, the orphans keep singing merrily as they scrub the floors. Who knew that Elizabeth would draw such inspiration from this to clean her playroom without me even asking her to!

Cleaning is a source of a lot of arguments in this house. It takes a lot of restraint for me not to turn cleaning into a power struggle with her, so today’s victory is very sweet. Now when she tells me that she can’t clean her playroom all by herself, I can remind her of today’s thorough job!

If you’re looking for a movie for a preschool girl, I highly recommend Annie. Who knew singing orphans could be so inspiring!

Since my last post was back in January, it should be obvious that blogging was not one of my new years resolutions. It’s hard to jump back in when so much time has passed, but I’ll try!

Elena is 16 months. She’s starting to talk and her personality is really coming out. Her first sentence was a few months ago “Bye-bye daddy! *smooch*” Current favorite words are “mine, eat, uh-huh, yeah, and bad baby.” The last one is courtesy of her big sister. It’s great to see her growing language comprehension–and funny to see her sneaky side when she knows what you’re saying and deliberately doesn’t listen.

Her teeth are giving her problems though. She has 8 teeth: four top front, two bottom front, one left top molar and one left bottom molar. She looks a bit silly with only two bottom chompers, but we’re hopeful more will join them soon. Elena seems to like to eat, but she’s not eating very much yet. I wonder if this has to do with her slow teething. Good thing she’s still nursing like a champ!

We like to start them young when it comes to jobs around the house. Elena likes to carry Finley’s food bowl over to him and take Elizabeth’s “night-night cup” of water to her.

Elena spends a lot of her time copying her big sister. She absolutely beams when her sister does something fun. In some ways, Elena is a lot like her sister, but sometimes it’s amazing how different they are. As high-need as Elizabeth was as a baby, we never had a problem leaving her in the church nursery. Elena has finally lasted 45 minutes in the nursery as of last Sunday.

I also never had to call poison control for Elizabeth. She was never interested in putting stuff in her mouth, but Elena will eat ANYTHING–dirt, cat litter, dog poop, brake grease. I was pumping up bike tires and turned around to see a shiny, bright blue face. I think her tongue would have been blue if she had actually ingested any brake grease, but I called poison control anyway. They said if anything happens, it would most likely just be the runs. We smelled like automechanics for the rest of the day, but that was better than going to the hospital!