Mika at 4.5 Years

Height: 42"
Weight: 42 lbs.
Size: 6
Shoe size: 12
Favorite TV show: Barbie and Lego Friends (but Paul doesn't want her watching Barbie because it doesn't teach anything and it's basically like Real Housewives for little girls)
Favorite activities: painting, drawing, biking, swimming, cooking, baking

Still smears the paint all over her arms

Storytime and yoga at the library

Things she says:
"Ha ha ha ha ha, your birthday's longer, my birthday's shorter!"
Cheesy Factory = Cheesecake Factory (also thinks the brown bread there is chocolate bread)
"Wow, that's a big scrape!" (skyscraper)
She makes up songs that always start, "Hey, Mom. Dontcha know....."
She is starting to use the past tense verbs of correctly but still adds -ed to a lot of irregular verbs (like telled instead of told, teached instead of taught, stealed instead of stole).

She LOVES her doll. She named him Philip because my friend has a baby named Philip.

She loves taking him on our walks to pick up Jackson from school.

Mika likes to follow safe sleep guidelines :)

School:

• She LOVES preschool. She thinks it's so fun and loves playing with her friends there. Although she does complain that it's so long (I signed her up for the 9-3 option instead of the 9-11:30).
• Her parent-teacher conference went very well. I thought they were going to tell me that she was a problem child, never paying attention or following rules. But they said she's one of the very few who will listen the first time and do exactly what they tell her to do (why doesn't she do this at home??!?!).
• Her handwriting is really good. Her letters are big and legible. She is interested in academic stuff now, always counting and asking how to spell words. She is always spelling and writing her name.
• I LOVE her drawings. She draws eyelashes now because she saw me wearing mascara one day and wanted to incorporate that in her drawings. She usually draws the body, eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes, nose, mouth, hair, arms, legs, fingers, and toes.
• We are working on addition up to 10.
• She loves talking about rhyming words.
• She can count up to about 20. She had a hard time with 13 and 14 (she would say, "twelve, fourteen, fourteen, fifteen,...").
• We work on 24- and 36-piece puzzles together. She can do up to 12 by herself, but I don't think she could do harder ones.

First day of school!

So proud of the puzzles she did by herself.

Tidbits:

• When she's having an argument with Jackson, she'll yell at him that she's going to live in a separate house far away from him when they grow up.
• She still has a short attention span. Jackson gets frustrated a lot because Mika will ask to play a game, play for a few minutes, and then suddenly get up and leave.
• She tries to see the baby by looking in my belly button. She tries to feed him by shoving food in my belly button.
• She tries to sneak downstairs and watch the movies and TV that we watch. She watched the beginning of Deadpool, yikes! 
• She can snap her fingers and she's working on whistling.
• She loves wearing dresses and switching outfits 867 times a day.
• She likes to grab the inside sensitive part of my arm because she knows it tickles me. She loves being tickled.
• She loves playing dolls and Barbies. I think that stuff is so boring, but I try to play it with her sometimes.
• She still wakes up in the middle of the night whining for me. She does this about half the time and sleeps through the night half the time.
• She did so well in gymnastics this semester that she passed Pre-gym 1 in two months instead of the 4-6 that I thought it would take. I am going to encourage her to do gymnastics as long as she will do it because if I had to bet money on her doing sports, I would bet that she would be most interested in cheerleading when she's older.
• She lies a lot. She'll tell me she brushed her teeth when she didn't, that Jackson took the candy and not her, etc.
• She loves swimming and is always asking to go to the pool. 
• Sometimes she will throw me off guard by saying something that happened when she was two. I thought she wouldn't be able to remember that far back.
• Sometimes she has such an attitude! I'll tell her something and she'll sass back, "I already knowed that."
• She tries to do things by herself but can get frustrated and throw a tantrum when she can't do it.
• She usually takes an HOUR to eat a meal because she eats a large volume of food, she likes to talk, and she gets distracted and wanders away from the table.

Cheerleading clinic!

Finally gave got her first hair cut in October!