Sweet Karina

Karina is the classic middle child.  She is laid-back and plays well by herself, probably because her older sister (who is very vocal) and little brother (who is very active) command a lot of attention from her parents.  We have to constantly remind ourselves to make at point of spending one-on-one time with her, as she is content to entertain herself and doesn't necessarily ask that from us.

One of the favorite activities right now is riding the horse that is in the living room.  She uses a cowboy hat when riding her (her name is Pink Rainbow Horse or something) or put the hat on the horse.  She's also figured out how to ride the horse side saddle (like princesses) and even sitting backwards.  Quite creative.

She used to be a pretty adventurous eater but has recently declared that she no longer likes oatmeal (which she used to eat almost every day) and other things.  She says that she only wants to eat pizza or macaroni and cheese.  Despite the posturing, she is still willing to eat things like dumplings and noodles, which is probably her favorite food.

She still enjoys doing school work--if it's at home.  She enjoys being at home and would probably stay at home all day, every day, if she had her way.  She goes to pre-school because she has to, although seems to have fun there once she is there.  She is our home body.

And Karina is very good natured.  She is happy to help Eliana with Eliana's chore of setting the table every night.  Eliana moans and whines every time she has to set the table; in contrast, Karina runs over to help.

Karina and Eliana play together a lot.  When doing imaginative play, Eliana is often playing the dominant role and Karina the submissive role.  Here, Eliana is the mommy putting the baby to bed.

 Here's "Baby Karina" pretending to sleep.

Speaking of imaginative play, Karina is our child that can be engrossed in her own little universe for literally hours.  Emily recently got a Noah's Ark set of Playmobil from Craigslist and set it in the middle of the living room.  Karina played with it for 3 hours straight.

Below, Karina is playing with a little Angelina Ballerina doll by herself in her room.

Elvin snuck up behind her to record what she was saying...

As you can probably tell, Karina's speech is still a little hard to understand.  Although her grammar is excellent, she says funny things like "Daddy am going to work now?" instead of "Daddy is going to work now?"  Also, although she has made strides in the number of consonants that she can say, she still has trouble saying the K sound, as well as G, R,  S and SH sounds.  We can understand most of what she says, but there are times when we can't for the life of us figure it out.  We recently took her to get evaluated by speech therapists and she was borderline delayed in her speech.  The therapists said that if she was a boy, she would be considered still within the "normal" range.  So we are checking out our options of whether she needs to start speech therapy.

Otherwise, our Karina continues to grow and blossom with her sweet personality.