Sunday, May 19, 2013

Callie's Five Year Evaluation (Okay, Five and a Half)

We thought last year was bad when Callie's four-year review occurred five months late.  This year it seems that we are fortunate to post it nearly eight months late.  What can we say, life has been busy.  But our goal this year is for the review to be shorter and sweeter, so let's get right to it.

Fortunately, her annual doctor's appointment was two months after her birthday, so the following stats are only six months old.  Back in early December 2012, she was 44 1/2 inches tall, a.k.a. 3 ft 8 1/2 inches.  This put her in the 82nd percentile for height, her highest since birth.  Her weight was 38 lbs, which put her in the 45th percentile.  She has shown no sign of shrinking since December, so we imagine that the current numbers are higher, but consistent with the string bean look.


Overall, Callie is a great kid.  She makes us proud by consistently using her manners and showing a great deal of care and concern for others.  It's wonderful to see such compassion from such a young soul.  Shyness is certainly still there, but slowly but surely it's getting better.  One area in desperate need  of attention is her propensity to whine at the drop of a hat.  She's also still prone to throwing fits.  Therefore we continue to focus our efforts on learning how to respond better to every day situations.  Her sense of humor is still very evident, and this year she has been very interested in trying her hand at telling jokes.

This past year Callie has also expanded her participation in extracurricular activities.  She is nearing the end of her second year of dance and is very much looking forward to the recital.  And she just finished playing her second season of soccer, which has had its shares of highs and lows.  But she definitely ended the second season much better than she started the first.  And you could not tell Reese that she was not a part of both the soccer and dance.  She had to get dressed for dance class and had to be right there for every soccer practice and game.  And Callie loved it all.  The intense love between the two remains strong.  This year, though, they certainly have had many more opportunities to play together versus Callie simply dictating Reese's life.  However, this does bring the occasional argument or fight over the simplest of things.  Hopefully, however, love will always triumph.

Perhaps one of the biggest developments however, is that Callie is currently reaching the end of her time at daycare.  She has officially made the full circle of rooms in the center and is well known to everybody.  She continues to develop her pre-K skills (like counting to 100, identifying basic sight words, and coloring like nobody's ever colored before)  but is done with nap time.  Kindergarten will be a great opportunity for Callie, and because she will be one of the older kids she should be even more ready than we could have hoped to expect.

And we'll end by trying to sum up her favorite activities of her fifth year.  She loves riding her bike, which is a hand me down from the Abrahams, and she desperately wants to ride around the block by herself.  Callie also loves to spend time in the pool, and hopefully this summer will really learn how to swim.  She has become an expert cat caretaker, and is the go to person for Lily and Lola, Sharon and Chris's cats.  She learned how to play Uno and is a bit of a card fiend with a shady shuffle and a competitive fire that means every loss nearly leads to tears.  This year also marked Callie's first haircut, that resulted in a donation of 12 inches of hair to Locks of Love.

All in all, she has demonstrated remarkable growth in her fifth year as a member of Team Bowes.  She's a solid contributor and continues to blossom into best Callie she can be.

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