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Charlotte turned 6 on the 14th.  I had so many things to do to get ready for her birthday and other things, that I had to post pone the post about her until now in favor of getting some sleep.

Charlotte likes to draw.  Her artwork makes a sharp contrast with what Isaac produces.  He always creates some kind of ship or machine that usually needs some explanation to understand.  Charlotte’s drawings are more typical and resemble things like cats and people and bananas.  The other day she was doing her homework and the assignment asked her to draw 10 animals and she drew them all with bananas on their heads and talked about how it would make her teachers laugh.  When she had to draw 10 things she drew her cat with a disproportionately large body and 10 spots.  She was so proud of her drawings, she imagined her teachers laughing all day at them. As she was drawing a picture of a friend with short dark hair, she announced that if you do a good job drawing her, she will look like an Astronaut.

I love this self portrait that she made at the beginning of the school year.  The teacher gave each student a mirror and Charlotte noticed things like the freckles on her nose.Charlotte loves having something to anticipate.  She has been eagerly anticipating her birthday since October when she announced that it’s getting close to her birthday.  She regularly tells me that she’s so excited for Monday because it’s family night.  She also gets very excited about fun things they get to do in kindergarten.
Charlotte is very clever.  I was worried about her having a hard time spelling her name since it’s both long and phonetically irregular, so I posted her name on her wall.  I think she was about 3 when I found that she could spell her name both forwards and backwards. She learns things easily without being taught.  I’ve often discovered that she has learned concepts that I was teaching Isaac.  She figured out basic addition all on her own and started teaching herself multiplication the other day (she told me she had X sets of Y and that equaled Z –I wish I could remember the numbers that she used).

Charlotte is very confident in her opinion and personality.  She’s proud of who she is and happily declares her favorite things to anyone who wants to know.  Today she was talking about the differences between girls and boys.  She said that boys like things like fighting and stupid stuff, while girls like beautiful and lovely things like cats, bananas, and princesses.

Charlotte likes to talk about marriage.  I remember when the subject first came up that she wanted to marry Isaac.  When I told her she couldn’t marry her brother, she said she’d marry his friend Sam.  She said if Sam didn’t want to marry her, then she’d just marry someone in Isaac’s class that is nice to him.  Now that she’s in Kindergarten she is finding her own marriage prospects.  She told me about a week ago that she was going to marry a boy from another kindergarten class.  Recently she has changed her mind and told me that she would marry Ander who is in her class because he is her friend.  She even told her grandmother on the phone the other day that Ander is her boyfriend.  I’m not a fan of kids pairing off so young, but after asking her several questions, I found that her understanding of the term boyfriend is nothing more than a friend who is a boy and that they spend their time pretending adventures involving prates and spaceships at recess.

Charlotte seems to do well socially.  She considers anyone who knows her name to be a friend.  Shortly after school started, she said that Catherine said she stinks.  She didn’t seem embarrassed at all about it–her grandma asked her about kindergarten over Skype and Charlotte proudly proclaimed “Catherine says I stink.”  Charlotte said that she was friends with everyone in her class except Catherine, even though they still know each other’s names.  She eventually overcame that issue and now considers everyone in her class a friend.  When we go to the park, she approaches other kids and introduces herself and then considers them friends as soon as she knows their name.

Whenever there is a birthday in Charlotte’s kindergarten class, all the students draw a picture about what they like about the birthday kid.  The birthday kid draws a picture about themselves.  This is what Charlotte drew:She interpreted her writing as “I am OK when I fall down.”  It’s funny to me that of all the things she could write/draw about herself, that is what she came up with.