Our girl

Cora, Cora, Cora.

How your Daddy and I do love you! Your zeal for life, your laugh, your silly dancing, your love for us and for your sister. And, these days, for that orange plastic fish.

A few details from Cora's first month of being 4...

She was looking through one of her High Five magazines (the younger version of Highlights) and spotted a recipe for a silly apple smile, using apple slices for the lips and mini marshmallows for the teeth, held in with cream cheese.

She had such fun helping make them. She loves working in the kitchen, and I really enjoy having her help.

She likes to have our attention as she does "amazing" things, like jumping and spinning at the same time: "Look! Watch! I can do a cool trick!"

Cora also loves Play-Doh and coloring. In recent months, her coloring has transitioned from scribbling to actually coloring, choosing the colors and staying within the lines.

The picture with the flowered chair struck me and Stace - it's only maybe 2 1/2 inches high, so she was pretty detail-oriented to use a different color for the roses. She made the shamrock/heart project in Terrific Tots yesterday, and I was in class to help out. Most of the kids still colored very hard, but Cora was coloring gently, trying to color the hearts nicely and evenly.

She loves rainbows, and they are a frequent subject for her art projects. At Stroller Strides recently, we were on one end of the long line of moms and babies, and Cora noticed all the bright solid color shirts the moms were wearing: "Look! You all look like a rainbow!"
Cora also is more interested in letters and their sounds, and I know she will be reading sometime this year. She can sound out some simple words, with help.

She likes to sing, especially the songs on a CD by Jess Penner, a young songstress who performed on a Friday night at our church coffeehouse. It's happy, upbeat pop music, and we're happy to hear Cora singing along. I've got to get some video of it!
Cora's voice is still young and cute. She says "valilla" for vanilla, "naplin" for napkin, and "Nemo Finding" for "Finding Nemo."

Speaking of Nemo, Cora is well into a bandaid phase these days, and yesterday Nemo needed a bandaid for his fin, because he was hurt, too. And about those bandaids - Cora seems to hurt herself 10 times a day, and usually uses the words "straight into" when she describes what happened. ("I banged my arm straight into the chair!" I knocked my head straight into the corner!") I'm working with her on only complaining/CRYING when she's actually hurt...

And we have noticed that when she's in trouble, and we're disciplining her, she suddenly winds up banging her elbow, or stubbing her toe, etc. She'll also start crying, "I want Mummy! I want Mummy!" when I'm the one upset with her, or "I want Daddy!" when Stace is not happy with her. I think she wants us to hug her and forget about what she did or didn't do!
And over the last few days, she's said to us, "I'm scared of you!" when we're disciplining her. As if that will make us give up and allow her to misbehave.

Lastly, we've had to have a few talks with Cora about not rolling her eyes. The worst example came the day our cabinets arrived. Stace encouraged Cora to come into the garage to see them, and help him with sorting out the boxes. When she opened the garage door, Stace said something happy to her about the cabinets. Not impressed, Cora actually rolled her eyes at him. Whoa. Stace came down on her hard for that one, appropriately hard. We haven't had eye-rolling since.

All that said, Cora's been very good the past couple of days. Fun, funny, imaginative, helpful. As I said, we love her and are so thankful God saw us fit to parent her! He will never give us more than we can handle, right?!