Turning volcanoes off and Arantxa shares about school.

Lorena loves to talk, chat, and visit with people. At 3, she is much better at holding phone conversations than Arantxa. Sure, it comes more naturally to her, but mostly she enjoys doing it. She is definitely a "people's person". She says "HI" and engages in little talk with the cashier, the parking lot attendant, etc. Her teacher ir probably hearing lots of random things about us, like we went to dinner at the Olive Garden. We should be carefull now not to do anything too embarrassing! However, the other side of this is that we also get to hear bits about other people. So we know, that Terri (teacher) also went to the Olive Garden last week ;).

I can't complain about Arantxa, she does tell us a good deal about what happened at school. For instance, last time I picked them up, she was showing me who her "second grade buddy was". She and Bailey sometimes talk about what happened in school. Sometimes, Arantxa doesn't want to talk to Pablo about school, "because I already said that in the car". Now, at dinner, we are having a different problem; Lorena begins to relate all of Arantxa's school day! She really wants to talk and share that, and Arantxa, naturally, gets super upset about it!!! We have told Arantxa that the best way to avoid that is to tell things first. We are also explaining to Lorena that it'd be nice if she let her big sister do the talking. :) the kind of complicated sibling scenarios that we did not anticipate'.

On a different topic, Lorena and I were listening to a CD in the car, those personalized ones that include their names. "Cuando sea grande quiero ser..." (When I grow up I want to be a ...). We hadn't heard that CD in a while, so instead of saying "a mommy and a painter"; she asked what a soldier was (why didn't she ask about a journalist?). My lousy explanation could be summarized as "soldiers=war countries=bad". After stumbling on that, I realized that due to transitivity, my explanation had equated soldier with bad person. I then added that soldiers=help/natural disasters". One of my examples was setting sand bags for preventing flooding. After some thought she said "oh, and then they can throw sand inside the volcanoes!". No, I had to explain it doesn't quite work, but it does sound like a good idea ;). She then said, "well, then they can drop water in them".