Penelope's 8 Pictures

Penelope is getting Baptized tomorrow!  We are so excited and happy for her!

Penelope is such a sweet and thoughtful child and this is a huge milestone for her.  In so many ways she seems extra mature for an 8-year-old.  

She definitely is a planner, everything is thought out and preplanned in her head way in advance.  She rarely forget things.

Penelope can get really nervous for thing but this past year I feel like she has started to come out of her shell.  She started going to activity days (a group of girls 8-11) without any problems and she went to her new church class without hesitating.  She even talks to the other kids in her class, which is huge if you knew her in our previous ward.  She tends to stay quiet in group settings but she will talk to her friends and answer questions in a group if asked.

I've noticed she really takes on the big sister role with Scarlett.  They do a lot of things together and she has really stepped up and been the one to lead the way, where sometimes Scarlett will be too scared.  She is also a great big sister to baby Calista.  She loves to hold and play with her.  She cracks me up because she is was so analytical about it at first.  The first time Calista cried while Penelope was holding her she didn't know what to do.  So we talked about softly bouncing her.  So the next time I saw that Calista started crying she mechanically started bouncing her.  Penelope was confused as to why Calista didn't instantly stop crying.  That seems like ages ago because now Penelope is a pro and holding and calming down her baby sister.  It has been such a lifesaver because Calista hates to be put down.

Penelope has specific tastes when it comes to her hairstyles.  It was hard for me to convince her to leave her hair wavy like this for pictures.  She likes it straight down, because that is easiest and quickest.  When I convince her to let me do her hair she likes it neat and nice.  No bumps or poofs on top, and absolutely no messy buns.  Which is a shame because messy buns are my fav.  Even when she takes her hair down at night she doesn't like to go to bed with it looking crazy.  Once she was up crying about it.  It seemed silly to me because no one could even see her.  But I took her into the bathroom and sprayed her hair down and let her comb it out to get rid of the "craziness."

We are homeschooling her this year and it is going really well for her.  She is an awesome reader and has even taken to staying up later than Scarlett and Leon because she is reading on her own.  Math isn't a problem for her although she does sometime write a few numbers backwards.  Writing seems to be the biggest struggle for her.  But we are working on stretching out the sounds and just putting down her best guess.  She gets frustrated because when I tell her to just guess she will but then she won't be able to read it back to herself later.  So so wants to spell everything right but she doesn't know how.  I made her a little chart with common words that she can look at.  That helped but it also slowed her down a ton because she was trying to find how to spell the whole time.  When I'd rather she just let go and let her creativity flow by forgetting spelling and write whatever pops into her head.

Penelope is such a great child, we love her so much!