November 20th:
Leilani had a bad streak that ended about a month ago. She was moody, demanding, and pouting a lot. She was also sick, which probably had something to do with it. She was much better behaved this past month, but this week again she was whiny and showing signs of the old behavior.
Several times today, she couldn’t handle being told (rather nicely) that she needed to do something, and stormed off when we told her that wasn’t a good way to behave. She goes to her room, closes the door (or slams it, depending on how upset she is), and gets over it by herself. We find her playing or drawing nicely 5 or 10 minutes later, or she comes back out, and she usually apologizes, prompted or unpromted, now that she knows.
One time today, she came back 10 minutes later and showed this to Sonja:
We couldn’t read all of it, so we had Leilani read it to us:
Dear Mom
I’m sorry
that (looks like “about” to me) I was so schlimm (German for naughty)
I hope that I can
find a way to make [it]
better Love
Leilani
Although a lot of words are absolutely not recognizable some of them are, I’m pretty proud of her. She’s been practicing a lot of writing recently, dictating for us so we can write it down, then she can copy the letters. She wrote to two friends recently like this, to invite them for play-dates. She also copies the words on the covers of her favorite books, and sometimes tries to write words on her own like this.
But this is the first time she’s tried to write whole sentences and a whole letter all by herself. Now I just wish she didn’t have so many reasons to apologize and have to write letters like that :-)
