This post is only about two months late, but it roughly corresponds which Julia’s five-year checkup, which was just a couple weeks ago. According the doctor, she’s now three feet, seven inches all—they measure in feet and inches now, instead of just inches, which is a little bittersweet—and weighs thirty-nine pounds.

Julia’s also about two months into her kindergarten career, and she’s loving it, though I think she enjoys the after-school care run by the YMCA as much, if not more so, than school itself. She likes her teacher, Mrs. Romero, tremendously, but it’s not entirely clear what Mrs. Romero thinks of Julia.

The class uses an interesting disciplinary system. There are green, yellow and red apples posted on a bulletin board, along with the kids’ names. Every day, each child starts out on the green apple. Kids who are well-behaved stay on the green apple; kids who need to be reminded to listen or follow the rules move down to the yellow apple, though they can move back up to green if they pay particular attention to being good. Kids who don’t heed warnings or commit gross violations of the rules end up on the red apple for the day. At the end of the week, Mrs. Romero sends home a green, red or yellow certificate summarizing each child’s performance during the week.

Things started out well enough for Julia, and she was on green for the first month or so. But then things took a decided turn for the worse: she brought home red certificates for two consecutive weeks and a yellow certificate last week, which would seem to imply that she’s spent a fair amount of time on the red apple. Worse, for a while there, she was actually telling us that she was on the green apple every evening, so either there’s been a terrible case of mistaken identity or our darling daughter as learned to be a bit flexible with respect to the truth. We’re not quite sure exactly what happened on each occasion, but we’re told that spitting was involved at least once.

On the plus side, yellow is a step up from red, so at least we’re on an upward trajectory.

Obligatory Joe note: he’s now more or less completely potty trained, and we finally put away (well, hid in the shower) his potty chair last weekend. Naturally, he rewarded us by having two accidents yesterday morning.