growing up

At night, when I put the kids to bed, I often have time to reflect on how much things are changing, on how fast they are changing... its all good, but amazing how fast we are living.

We had Easter last weekend and it was finally a fabulous precursor to summer... the kids spent the whole weekend in and out of the house.  They were so pumped the night before the party and it was so nice outside we had lots of time for chasing ... Zoe is in love with playing tag.. "toilet tag", "tv tag", freeze tag, you name it.. however 3 year olds do not know nor care to know how to play tag.  Finn gets upset when he is tagged or when we out run him. So to salvage my sanity we built an obstacle course... off the slide, walk a board, jump over buckets, climb recycling bins, shoot a basket, dribble the ball, do it all over again.  We even added to doing it while carrying a plastic egg in a shovel and added scooters around the kiddie pool.

Zoe is amazing... I hung out in her classroom one day after dropping her off late.. we had to do the last step to get our Permanent Residency (yeah!, we finally did it after 5 years!) and I watched her class mates come up and talk to the teacher in halting french.. every word a pause and action.. Zoe however, just went up to her, said some sentence real quiet, but quite confidently and carried on.. amazing!  She is starting to read, has quite a few sight words, confidently sounds out words, she is working hard on writing too.

She is learning about being with friends, which to keep, which to stay away from.. she mentioned one girl in another class getting bullied.. she was crying, and then Zoe got a look on her face.. she said, "no, I wont' tell you" and then after some encouragement she did.. her friend had said something to the girl who later cried, and Zoe backed the non-crying girl up. and she felt guilty about it.. 

She told me this week that a different girl insisted Zoe bring her chocolate.. and Zoe said she wouldn't do it because it might make other girls feel bad.  Later this week, that same girl ignored Zoe and Zoe now says they are definitely not friends.  It is amazing the drama...

Zoe also today revealed that she played with Stuart today.. said he was throwing her jacket around... I told her that was a sign that he liked her.. you can only imagine the smile on her face.. (I was driving.. I'm imagining it too).. after a yahoo and sigh, she said she was going to marry him some day.