Ila at 6
Ila started kindergarten this year and she loves everything about it. She loves her teacher and gets along well with her classmates and she’s so proud to be a school girl. I was a little worried about how she would do since she can be such a shy sensitive girl, but she has been confident and friendly and has made lots of new friends. Everyday she gets so excited as she tells me about what she did at school that day. She’s also lucky to have her mom volunteer in her class every Wednesday and her Dad teaching music in her class on Fridays. Today she asked me if I could guess what part of kindergarten was the worst and then she told me that it’s when they have to line up and go home.
Ila has been excited to learn to read. She has learned all the Kindergarten sight words and has been gaining confidence in her ability to read. She has started noticing and commenting on the different sounds in words all around the house. She’ll say things like “I want something for lunch that starts with a digraph.” (That means she wants “ch ch chicken nuggets”)
Ila adores her big sister Charlotte. Most days Ila spends all afternoon and evening with Charlotte and Lucie (our neighbor). The three of them make up imaginative scenarios about everything. If they have to clean something they pretend they’re in “slave school.” Sometimes they refer to the kitchen as the mess hall and pretend to be at a camp.
Ila’s love of everything orange has faded this year. She decided that pink was her favorite color for a few months and now she says blue is her favorite. I’m hoping she changes her mind back to orange because it’s unique and it represents her roots (as a girl who was born in Knoxville).
Her favorite toys are Lego Friends. She loves to play with Charlotte’s Lego sets and always chooses to be the Lego animals.
Ila is an animal lover. She thinks every baby animal is adorable and loves to talk about animals. She often carries around little stuffed animals.
Ila is still an intensely picky eater. Some of her siblings were starting to catch on to the fact that she got to eat something different at every meal, so we’ve recently started requiring her to have a small bite of 2 parts of our dinner before she can choose something else to eat. There has been much crying and complaining, but she’s managed to taste more things in the last month than she has in years and the other kids have stopped requesting other food too. She even secretly admitted that she’s starting to actually like pizza and she doesn’t abhor potatoes anymore.
She loves to help me bake, especially if whatever I’m making has chocolate chips in it.
Everyday Ila tells me she loves me “this much” and stretches her hands out as far as she can or tells me she loves me “a tillion” which is a made up number that’s more than a million billions. Then she’ll often follow it up with “and this is how much I hate you” which she will represent by holding her hands together as if to say not at all.
Here are links to what I wrote about her each year on (or near) her birthday: Ila at 5, Ila at 4, Ila at 3, Ila at 2, Ila at 1