What has Karina been up to?

Our Karina is four going on five and keeps herself busy every day. She is really interested in arts and crafts and asks to do projects every day.  Here is a lion that she put together.  It's especially challenging because you have to use needle and thread.

She also enjoys spending time in the kitchen, especially if Elvin is baking something.  Whereas in the past, she used to totally be Mommy's girl, she is seeking Elvin out more and more.  Here she is helping Elvin make pumpkin muffins.

Recently, Karina has taken an interest in letters, words, reading and writing.  She sees her big sister writing words and wants to do the same.  So she put together a notebook using cardboard for the covers and computer paper for the pages, and then had Daddy bind it together using yarn.  And then she started writing "stories" in it.

Here is Karina explaining what the book is about.  Sorry about the background noise.  Also, Elvin is interviewing her in Portuguese but we did not put in subtitles...sorry!

She has learned all the sounds that each letter makes and a couple of weeks ago, was able to sound out a couple of simple words.  Good job, Karina!

Her mastery of English has also reached a new level.  She says phrases (correctly) and sometime we wonder where she picks them up.  The other day she said: "I'll be back in a flash!"

As we have mentioned before, she is definitely the engineer of the family.  She likes building things, especially structures.  As she was building the pyramids below, she encountered a problem--she wanted the tips of the pyramids to connect together with the curvy pieces, but they weren't long enough to reach each other.

So she solved the problem by building an extra pyramid (for symmetry's sake) and using extra curvy pieces to connect all the pyramids to a center ball!

In the bathtub, we recently inherited these toys from friends that are chutes you can suction cup to the side of the bathtub.  If you line them up right, then the water will run from one onto another in a cascade--which is exactly what she did.

Karina also has a very silly side.  Here she is making a funny face.

And here's another silly thing that she did...we were playing hide-and-seek and she decided to hide outside.  In a way where she thought no one could see her!

She also enjoys jumping on the little trampoline that we got for Xiao Yu.  In fact, all the "big" kids probably use it more than Xiao Yu does.

 

Even before we got the swing set, Karina had been asking Daddy to build her a rope ladder.  We are not sure where she got the idea for this but was persistent for many weeks.

So Daddy got some wooden dowels and rope at Home Depot and was able to put something together after an internet search.

We hung it off of our swing set and Karina plays on it almost every day.

We also want to mention that Karina is still the sleepyhead of the family.  She needs the most amount of sleep out of all of our kids and when very tired, she will BEG Mommy or Daddy to go to sleep.

Karina's year in pre-school ended and so there was a graduation ceremony.  There was a banner up where all the kids signed their names.  Karina signed hers next to the purple hand prints.  It's ok if you can't make out her name--she wrote it backwards!

 Here are all the kids in her class.

 Here is a close up shot of her wearing her graduation cap.

At the end of the ceremony, each kid went up to shake Mrs. Walker's hand.  Mrs. Walker is a great teacher and role model for her kids.  We really like her.

 And here is Karina holding up her graduation certificate.

 We've taken many pictures in front of this sign for their preschool and will continue to do so.  This is because not only will the boys attend this preschool sometime in the future, also Karina will be attending it as well. We have decided that because she is young for her grade, we will hold her back for a year, before starting kindergarten.

Regardless, it feels like our little girl is growing up fast!