Keeping Up With The De Oliveiras: Heading Into the New Year

Just a little bit behind on updating the blog... I've been very busy lately. Can't believe how quickly May, June and July have flown by. But more about that in future blog posts!

On December 31st Carlos and I put the kids to bed and started on our own New Year's Eve dinner that we ordered from the catering service at our local grocery store. It was fun to get dressed up and have a meal for just the two of us, champagne and all!

Alixe made a bunch of progress language-wise at the beginning of the new year. Lots of little sentences and phrases. She even came up to me one day, gave me a hug and said "I love you, Mama!" without any prompting. She began pointing at objects and naming them, much to our amusement, and Aimy would praise her every time she got something right, which was almost as fun to hear. Alixe also began calling her sister by name (though it sounds a bit more like Mimi than Aimy!) The girls played together even more, with Aimy trying to show her sister how to play properly, even if Alixe was more interested in doing her own thing.

Aimy was happy to go back to school in January despite having a lot of fun during the holidays. Though her shoulder injury had healed enough for her to not need the sling anymore, there were still days where she would ask me if she could wear her "backpack" to school. She started to pout all the way home on days where I would pick her up from school and not have her stay at the cafeteria for lunch - definitely a sign that she enjoys being at school with her friends. And she even began to try telling me about her day at school in French, She definitely made progress with her language skills, though she still had trouble making sentences in clear French.