These pictures are from our family vacation to the tatra mountains in Slovakia- just before school started again. And this boy. He has so much personality and energy. The first picture is one I made him take, as you can tell. The second is his version and the pose he gives us most often now. I'm not sure where he learned it, but I would bet it's from school. ;)
He was very happy to go back to school and see his friends and spend time with them and his teachers. He has always loved school (except for those occasional mornings he's too tired to get up) and always enjoyed being there with his friends. He's also had the same two main teachers for the past 2.5 years. I love that the system here is such as this. It will be similar in the next phase of schooling as he moves to elementary school next year. He'll have many of the same teachers and be grouped with the same classmates for several years to come (if we're living here in Olomouc that long). I've been with enough students now over the years to see how it can make for some great memories and friendships in their lives. It's also been good for me to see and know the same mothers and fathers over the past few years with Jakub in preschool.
Here are a few things I want to remember about Jakub right now:
- He's 122 cm tall ( around or just over 4 feet)
- He is skinny with long legs and big feet. His pants are always falling off of his waist now, but never long enough in the legs and often above his ankles. Super stylish. :)
- He is still very confident in himself and continues to want to be first, be the fastest, be the smartest, do everything first. He'll often try a new task, word, or food with confidence and lack of fear. He does, however, get shy if a large group of people are around and they are not familiar to him.
- He speaks Czech very well now, like a native child would. He has even interpreted for me on a couple of occasions when I didn't know the word(s) other children were saying to me.
- He LOVES candy and asks for it every day. He prefers it over chocolate or other sweets. Suckers are his favorite thing.
- He's active and energetic and can go all day. It often surprises others how much he can do or wants to do and still seems full of energy straight through to bedtime. :) We recently went away for a church retreat weekend with our local church community and on that Saturday we went for a 6 hour hike up and back down a nearby hillside. Except for a rare and short piggy-back ride he walked the entire time with us. He was of course very tired at the end, but still happy and capable of doing it all. I was so proud of him!
- Some of his favorite ways to play are with legos, cars and tracks, doing puzzles, reading books with me and trying to sound out and spell words now, and playing hide-and-seek.
- He and Sofia can play very sweetly together, but they can also fight horribly. He loves to hide and scare her, which she doesn't always like.
- He's very much looking forward to turning 6 and often asks how many days until his birthday.
- He still loves to sing and whistle and is almost always humming a tune of some kind and appears to sing very well. He can't not make music of some kind while he works or plays. I'm curious how his teachers deal with this at school, but I don't want to ask. :)
That's all for now. Hopefully I'll have more swimming pictures or videos coming soon.
