Done is better than perfect. Is this the five year post I wanted to put up for Matthew? No. I still want to tweak it/improve it/better capture Matthew at this age. But is it time for this post to be done sitting in my draft folder? One hundred percent. Especially since all of these pictures are circa 2024 and I even confused myself reading through the information I had typed since it dates back almost two years, not this past year. And since the pictures/information are only getting more irrelevant (especially since he's already almost six!), on the interwebs they go. Finally.
Age: 5
Height: 3 ft 6 in
Weight: 38lb, 6.5oz
What is your favorite color? Blue
What is your favorite animal? Cheetah or Tiger
What is your favorite book? My Lucky Day
What is your favorite song? Go Tell it on the Mountain
What is your favorite sport? Soccer and Football
What is your favorite thing to do with Mom? Color
What is your favorite thing to do with Dad? Get tickled
What is your favorite thing to do outside? Soccer
Where is your favorite place to go? Lucy's gym
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| Lucy's gym has rings, and once he got the hang of them there was no looking back |
What is your favorite fruit? Apple
What is your favorite vegetable? Carrot and Sweet Potato
What is your favorite cereal? Marshmallow Treasures
What is your favorite treat? Smarties
What is your favorite meal? Spaghetti and Italian Spaghetti
What makes you happy? Doing my marble track and stickers
What makes you sad? When someone hits me
Who are your best friends? Lucy and Rose and all the Griggs family
What do you want to be when you grow up? Artist
What was your favorite part of last year? Playing games on the couch downstairs
What is one thing you want to do this year? Play with my remote control car
At four, the heights of all the boys were within an inch of one another. By five, Connor had started to shoot up and break away from the pack. As of right now, it appears Matthew is going to follow Connor's track and establish himself as one of the "taller" brothers; he is dead even with Connor at five, which is an inch and a half taller than William or Garrett were.
In another instance of William and Garrett vs Connor and Matthew, both of the older two were full-on reading by five, but Connor--and now Matthew--were not. Matthew is slowly starting to show interest in letters and sounds and figuring out how they go together (and he can write his name and the majority of the alphabet pretty easily), and he can recognize where the words are on a page, but that's about it for him. I have noticed that he still has a tendency to go right to left when we are talking about beginning sounds in words (or when he is reading numbers: 14 becomes 41), so that's definitely something we'll be keeping an eye on as he starts kindergarten. However, also like Connor at five, his math skills are unreal. He can do +1 and -1 of just about any number (probably up to thirty or so), and he can do sums/differences of four or more up to about 20. He is really good at dividing (although with him we just talk about it as "splitting things equally"), and can often figure it out in his head how many muffins each of them should get if we have 12 to split. Even when we play Chutes and Ladders I've noticed that he doesn't always "count" his spaces; he'll just pick up his piece and move it to the next spot (with probably about ninety percent accuracy).
He continues to play independently really well, and has (finally!) started to get into puzzles (and after like a week of doing the 24 piece wooden puzzles he decided to jump straight to the 100 piece puzzles, so rationally I know it's time to get rid of our "baby" puzzles, but I just can't bring myself to pull the trigger on that yet!). He'll still take naps during the week pretty consistently (mostly because I'm not ready to lose my alone time in the afternoon!), but usually skips them on the weekend and is just fine. Darrell keeps reminding me that we need to get him used to not taking naps before kindergarten, but that's what summer break is for, right?
Speaking of summer, we tried multiple times over the summer to get him to practice riding his pedal bike (as opposed to his Strider bike that doesn't have pedals). He'd either flat out refuse to pull it out, or get on it, pedal it once or twice, and declare it "too hard". Then randomly in the beginning of September he asked to get out his pedal bike, and later that evening he was zipping up and down the block by himself. This is his personality in a nutshell: when he's in the mood to do something there is no stopping him (literally--when he is in a mood to play games, you'd better carve out your entire morning for endless rounds of UNO, Chutes and Ladders, Guess Who, etc), but there is absolutely zero forcing him to do something he doesn't want to do.
A few other random Matthew memories: he loves (LOVES) hide and seek and fully grasps the whole being quiet and hiding thing. Sometimes to a fault because we don't always realize he's playing and there have definitely been a few moments of panic when he hasn't answered us when we've called for him. He calls his big toe his "thumb toe", which I love, and after ten weeks in the spring of doing daycare for my niece (who is Matthew's age), he FINALLY started picking up on when to use he vs she. Poor Lucy didn't care for being referred to as a "he" or "him" but she tolerated it well.
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| First time roller skating! |
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| Mom's little hiking buddy |
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| See rocks, will climb. Always |
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| Not gonna lie, I'm a little jealous that I never thought to create a canopy/fort on the bottom bunk when my sister and I shared a bunk bed |
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| First summer as a Little Vikes camper at Leif Ericson Day Camp! |
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| He loves Lucy's gym so much it was his request for his birthday outing this year! |
