Merry Christmas and Happy 2009!

It's been a while and I really do need to catch up. Today, we are facing the Day After Christmas anticlimax. But, this has been the most fun Christmas yet. With Amelie being 4 now, we are in prime Christmas years. We spent the month from Thanksgiving until Christmas listening to Christmas music, baking Christmas things, watching Christmas shows, looking at lights and everything else we could think of to get into the Christmas spirit. She woke us up at 5:30 to see if we could go out and look to see if Santa came. Of course Santa came - with a vengeance! She was just as eager to see and help others open theirs as well. She was so excited and full of energy and it was so much fun to watch and experience this with her.

Amelie has changed so much just within the last 6 months. As she got closer to 4, she seemed to have acclimated much more to a role of a nurturer to those younger than her (she had previously been somewhat impatient with babies and children smaller than her before). She has adjusted so well to school and is now coming home writing her name and asking how to spell other words so she can write those out as well. We have notebooks scattered throughout the house and car so she can write and take notes whereever she may happen to be. Other things like games and art project are much more enjoyable now and our options for things to do around the house have opened up a lot to us now.
Since I last updated the blog, we celebrated Amelie's birthday with a party at Backyard Adventures with 17 of her friends. She had a blast even though, at times, she showed she is still not at ease being the center of attention. She had been planning her birthday party since May when we were in D.C. and even wanted to invite Barack Obama (who was not able to make it). We also got to celebrate the actual day with the Suitt's since Victoria's birthday is on the same day. We all went to Disney and really enjoyed getting to watch the girls experience Disney together.

We also have been camping twice - once to Fort Wilderness the day after Thanksgiving and are now making it a tradition to camp there the whole week of Thanksgiving and get to stop by Granny Great's on the big day before going back to enjoy our Disney passes. We went camping again in December with Ging and Poppy at Fort Desoto where we got to fish right from our campsite. We experienced one of the dramatic storms the first night we were their where the wind was quite impressive, but had a much less eventful trip the rest of the time.

Amelie still amazes us with her ingenuity and creativeness where she can take random objects and see something else in them. When we were at Fort Desoto, there were little stands with plaques of information about different things at the fort. Amelie would stop at one to tap her stick and conduct music.

Bunny is still her best friend who travels everywhere with us and is a great emotional support (or great turmoil if we make the mishap of forgetting him like we did on Thanksgiving). When we were camping at Fort Desoto, Ging and I had taken her over to the playground and were about to head back when Amelie said, "Wait a minute, I have to rub Bunny's ear first". We all stopped while Amelie went into a trance for about a minute to rub Bunny's ear on her ear. She also did the "nursy" thing with her tongue. After about a minute, she said "Okay, I'm good now and we could go on our way.

She is a very affectionate and loving child who asks for hugs throghout the day. One day, I was having lunch with her at her school when one of her friends walked by. Amelie called her over and gave her a hug and a kiss before she went on her way. She has also shown natural leadership skills to those around her (even if they are several years older). She has a very positive way of getting others to do her bidding while making them feel good about it. Some friends recently went to observe Amelie's classroom where they got to see Amelie in action. They were the fly on the wall for me. They told me how Amelie was so proud to see someone she knew in the classroom that she kept bringing her friends over to introduce them to each other. She then had brought some work on to the rug where she had one of her friends holding the box top for her. Another friend soon came over saying she wanted to help and Amelie had a dilemma since there was only one box top. She quickly solved this problem by saying, "I know! You can hold this corner and you can hold this corner" and they both did as she said and were smiling the entire time. Eventually, 2 more friends came over and Amelie had to find jobs for each of them as well.