Nicole at 5
I have had a really hard time finding time to write lately, so my annual post about Nicole is a little late this year. Here is what I wrote about her last year.
Nicole has grown up a lot over the last year. She started preschool at the beginning of November. She really likes it and is learning so much! She can now spell and write her name and has developed a new interest in letters and letter sounds. 
Her communication skills continue to improve. Last year, she was just beginning to understand that questions required a response and not just a repetition. Now most of her communication is in question form. She often asks questions with a specific response in mind:
What do I wear on Sundays?
Dresses!
She is able to retell a series of things that happened to her or things that might happen. One day when she was anticipating the 100th day of school, she made up a story about what would happen on that day and at the end of the story she said her teacher would drive away in one of her classmate’s cars and then she laughed and laughed at that idea.
She is still my little family ambassador. She readily shows affection for people she hardly knows, hugging them or holding their hands. One day she saw a lady at the park who was eating her lunch. The lady had some juice that Nicole wanted. Nicole stood close to her and smiled at her. The woman offered her some of her lunch which Nicole refused, but Nicole continued to move closer to the lady and smile at her. Finally Nicole leaned over and hugged the lady then looked at her expectantly. When she didn’t offer Nicole her juice, Nicole happily went off to play.
She is still periodically scared of our cats. It’s odd because they’ve never scratched her or bitten her. Sometimes she’s too afraid to walk by a cat when she needs to go get something or if a cat walks by her, she’ll start crying and running away.
She still enjoys books, especially thick ones. She usually falls asleep with a collection of Curious George stories that are bound into a thick yellow book on her lap. If I bring home a bunch of library books, she’ll pick out the thickest one to look at.
Nicole’s drawings are some of my favorite. They resemble people, but the features are exaggerated in funny ways. Sometimes as she’s drawing and something comes out strange, she accepts it as part of the drawing and makes up a story about why it’s that way. Today she drew a tummy with squiggly lines in it and decided it was full of spaghetti, so she added hot dogs and proudly declared that the tummy was full of spaghetti and hot dogs.
She’s so expressive and unpredictable that I love to watch what she does. She cracks me up in ballet because she regularly gets distracted by all the mirrors and starts making faces at herself. One day I asked her to take off a dress-up before ballet so that she could be like all her friends and she confidently replied “I don’t want to be like my friends!” I loved it because it fits so much with her personality. She definitely marches to her own drummer.
Thankfully she doesn’t change her clothes as often as she did a year ago, but she does have her own sense of style. She loves skirts and dresses and colorful things. She likes bright colorful socks, especially knee-highs. I used to organize her dresser with PJs on the bottom, then jeans, then shirts, with all the clothes that needed to be carefully matched in the top drawer. When she discovered the top drawer, she started composing her outfits only out of top drawer clothes and the combinations were terrible. At some point I gave in and moved her jeans up to the top drawer and got her some more skirts. I she’s worn jeans only once in the last several months.
Nicole is better at playing with her siblings these days. Ila and Nicole love to get out their dolls and pretend to be mothers together and they enjoy making beds all over the house. Nicole has been taking more of a leadership role in their play as well. She loves to go on walks with Charlotte in the woods or to play outside with Isaac. The older kids enjoy playing with her because she’s generally willing to do whatever they want to do.
She still loves the color purple. She also likes monkeys and owls. She regularly talks about when she’s big enough to be a mom and tells me that she’ll go to the temple and get married. Sometimes she asks me rather insistently who she will marry and doesn’t want to accept that I don’t know.
Nicole is a joyful, happy girl who anticipates things with much excitement. She’s loving and funny and creative and I love her to pieces!