Birfday grill

While the rest of us played a ruthless game of Nertz (one of the things Andrew wanted to do after dinner), Phoebe decided she wanted to write a birthday letter to her cousin Oaklyn (whose birthday is tomorrow). She didn't really tell any of us this, so we all just thought she was happily drawing...until she said, "Can someone please tell me how to make an F? I'm trying to write Happy Birfday, Oaklyn..."

She had gone through several drafts by this point and was rather frustrated by her many false starts (you can see one paper in particular in the stack below with many attempts crossed out):

I'll be honest: while we have been working our way through reading lessons we've straight up been skipping the writing portion. There were various reasons for this decision—she wasn't interested, she's young and is still working on the fine motor skills prerequisite to letter formation, I'm so busy this semester that it's not even funny, that kind of thing. 

So we've done some practice with letters, but not much. 

This, though, tells me that it's time to begin in earnest...after the semester is over, probably.

Here she is, with tears of frustration still glittering in her eyes.

And here is her masterpiece (before she added grass to it):

It says "Phoebe" in the top right corner. 

Along the lefthand side it says:

Happy
Birt
HDay
to Oaklyn

It's kind of an awkward place to hyphenate a word, "birt-hday," but as Miriam pointed out it's much less awkward than the time Rachel (or was it Miriam?) was making a get well card for her friend Diego, who had cancer. She wanted to write his name across the front of the card but ran out of room midway through so went onto the next line...but went above instead of below...so the card looked like this:

GO
DIE

I, uh, made her make a new (unhyphenated) card for poor little Diego, who is healthy and happy and currently finishing up his senior year in high school (he had been in Rachel's grade but repeated the grade he missed while he was busy with chemo and everything—obviously he was quite young when this happened, given Rachel's (Miriam's?) handwriting skills...I think he repeated grade one...yup, that would be the year that he missed). 

Anyway, Phoebe was very glad to finish this picture for Oaklyn. We have it in an envelope ready to go out tomorrow (along with a picture of a rainbow for Ireland).

*****

Before dinner, Phoebe called out, "If you're a grill, fold your arms!"

All the kids folded their arms.

"Haha! Benny—you're a grill! Alex—you're a grill!"

"What...is she talking about?" Benjamin asked.

"Yeah, so...she can't say girl..." I explained.

"Oh!" Alexander said, unfolding his arms quickly. "Ew!"

We still have some work to do with her pronunciation...obviously.