Starring Esther

Yikes, I cannot believe how long it's been since I posted!  It's just hard to find time to sit down and write, I guess.  I can't do it during the school day because I'm teaching Esther; someone always seems to need me in the afternoon; and by evening I just don't feel like writing!  But of course we've been doing interesting things and I have some fun pictures I want to share.

Daniel getting his school pictures back reminded me that I wanted to do a school picture of Esther this year.  So I enlisted Daniel as photographer.  With the help of an aluminum-foil-covered pizza box to disperse the flash attractively, and a sheet hung up as a backdrop, we got almost professional results.  (Maybe I should have ironed the sheet first!)  The following three pictures are some of my favorites.  As you can see, she is growing her hair long and growing her bangs out.  This is the first year she has tolerated anything being in her hair for any length of time; before this she would ask for a ponytail or occasionally a barrette, but couldn't leave them alone for more than a few minutes.

 

Esther was a panda for Halloween.  She has been following the baby panda at the National Zoo via panda cam, and is a huge fan of all things panda at the moment.  And I think that creating a costume is half the fun of wearing one!  This ended up costing me about the same as if I had bought one, but it was cute and most of the pieces are just regular items of clothing that she can (and is) wearing for fall warmth.  I thought it turned out cute!

Esther is continuing to lose her baby teeth.  But they don't want to be lost.  One of her front top teeth stuck out at an angle for literally weeks, with the new permanent tooth coming in behind it.  People kept telling us that it was just hanging on by a thread...but that must have been one mighty strong thread!  And she wouldn't let us pull it, or try to pull it herself.  It FINALLY popped out (along with the one next to it, which was also loose) when she was playing chase with a little boy we were doing respite care for and decided to dive over the back of the couch head-first (from back to front, not front to back).  So she came running into the kitchen crying and dripping a pool of blood on the floor, while I tried to figure out what was my first priority--find the teeth? check for other injuries? protect her clothes from bloodstains?  Anyway, she survived, and got extra quarters under her pillow to compensate for the pain and suffering.  This is not the best picture I have of her gap, but it's the only one I can find right now.  You can see how far in her one permanent tooth got before the baby tooth was knocked out.

And this is a robin Esther drew during our study of animals, using instructions from a book called Draw! Write! Now!