Lumi: 6 Years, 5 Months

Summary
She is handling the move well. We have not appreciated enough how easy she has made it on us by being excited (rather than scared) and looking forward (rather than backward). The fact that her friends at barnehage are all going on to different schools has helped, because there have been a few ceremonies and rituals to mark it for her. In fact, after the "sommerfest" at barnehage when they said goodbye to everyone, she was ready to go and seemed frustrated that we didn't move immediately.
But the bigger news is that she is reading. She is sounding out words all over the place in all three languages. No books yet, but her progress in the last week of this month was amazing.

Social
She loved playing with 6 month old baby Johan.

She has said that she will miss her friends, but I think it helps that most of the kids in barnehage are splitting up and heading to different schools.

Leisure
The Richard Scarry "A Day At The Airport" book is very popular with both kids.

She is loving the books about fairies (the "Rainbow Magic" series), and we checked out more at the library. We also checked out a Magic Treehouse book and she seems into it.

She is all of a sudden dying to get a dog. Her friend from barnehage has an adorable new puppy and now she begs us for a puppy. "Or at least a cat". 😃

She found the calculator app on her phone (an old HTC that only holds a few apps and very simple games) and has loved practicing addition and subtraction. She even likes to quiz Otso.

27.6 trip to grocery store to use up Norwegian coins, and the kids got spinners

Learning
She likes her workbooks but really resists the "boring" stuff, like practicing the same letter several times. She gets quite frustrated with English spelling. For example, she wanted to write "palace" all by herself, so she wrote out "pales". When she checked it with me and found out it wasn't correct she got really mad and abandoned the whole project.

She is excited about having her own room and getting to make a sign that says something like "Keep Out" for the door. She is excited in general about the new house. We taped a drawing of the house (thank you vaari!) to the kitchen wall and she has been analyzing it.

14.6 she read through the list of names in her barnehage group, with no mistakes.

19.6 I think we can say concretely that she is writing in Finnish -- it is fantastic! She showed me a note in barnehage on 19.6 where she had written "Ustävä koko ajan" about her friends. It seems that she has figured out that Finnish is much better for sounding out words.

30.6 she spent the train ride to the airport reading words from signs all around her, in both Norwegian and English.

Language
7.6 she made a card for kimmo at barnehage. she wrote "Isäle" (=Isälle) "Lumita" (Lumilta) and clearly she didn't have any help because no one there speaks Finnish. it was really great!
She asks about words and their meanings now. She likes the Amelia Bedelia books but finds the humor to be very confusing, namely because she doesn't get the exposure to the idiomatic expressions. Since we live in an international environment, I (Angela) have tried to eliminate those from my speech so as not to be deliberately confusing to my friends and colleagues.

Food

6.5 we went to Burger King after our hike. One of the kids meals has pancake "bites" and she really loved them. She kept saying "these are really quite good!"

Health
11.6 she woke up a bit sniffly and achy.

Stats
size: 116 (6 in US size), sometimes 122 (7 in US). She has long limbs and needs the extra length. size 31 shoe.
height: 117 cm on 2017-05-21
weight: 19.4 kg on 2017-05-12
favorite color: "rainbow"

Events
5.6 hike up Vettakollen
6.6 playdate with Leon
8.9 the "5 Års Klubben" kids all spent the night at barnehage!
16.6 Helmine spent the night
18.6 lunch with Helena & Johan and family
21.6 barnehage "sommerfest", with ceremony for the  5-års klubben kids who are leaving for school
23.6 surprise party at Toni's house for the 5-års klubben -- lumi said it was the "best day ever"
25.6 Emmi's birthday party, Oliver's birthday party
26.6 Stellan's birthday party
29.6 moving truck, spent the night with helmine
30.6 last day of barnehage, Adrian birthday party, fly to Finland

Random
She tells us almost daily that she does not like curly hair and fervently hopes that her hair will stay straight. We have no idea where this is coming from: not liking äiti's hair? a friend's hair? a movie character?

3.6 she mentioned that she likes doing new and interesting things (after we complimented her on her creativity for using barrettes to attach various legos to äiti's hair while äiti was napping on the sofa)

5.6 on why we needed to bring a jacket when going up on a mountain "because it is closer to outer space, which is really cold."

8.6 she said to äiti, "sometimes you are the worst, but sometimes you are the best."

21.6 she was excited to get the family dressed on the day of "sommerfest" at barnehage. Otso wore his Hawaiian shirt. She asked Isä to change shirts to something brighter, then declared him "handsome". She asked that Äiti wear a dress, and demanded to see the options.

3.7 the city bus was taking a roundabout quite fast and Lumi exclaimed "wow, he's a great driver!"