It’s been awhile since I gave you a full update on the girls.
C. is full of new tricks. She learned, last week, how to remove her own shirt. I was sitting here in the office one day when she came walking in, sans shirt, with a big smile on her face, smacking her bare belly with her hands. I got the process on video the next day, but can’t get the video across from the camera for some reason. It’s pretty funny. Another day last week, she had her shirt off when she woke up in the morning. I went into M.’s room, and she too had her shirt off. What the heck is going on around here? I guess this warm October is getting to them.
C. has another highly annoying new trick. She likes to stick whatever is on her tray at meal times behind her head. At the end of each meal, her hair and neck along with the seatback are covered in whatever we fed her. It’s especially bad when we give her a bowl of something. Within 30 seconds, she’s placed the entire bowl against the back of her head. She even sticks her sippy cup back there and lets it just sit while she eats. Weird. Her vocabulary is getting bigger every day, but almost exclusively with S words, for some reason. She knows shoe, show, sister (which she says without moving her mouth, so it comes out like “shisher”), stairs, and sandbox. It’s fun to watch her understanding most of what we say, even if she can’t say it herself. Say, “Wanna go upstairs?” and she runs to the stairs and starts climbing. “Wanna brush your teeth?” and she jets to the sink. On the whole, the girls are really playing well together most of the time. M. tries to include C. in her little imaginary tales, which C. just does not get. But most moments find the two giggling and chasing each other. M. can get a little aggressive with C., generally in the form of pushing or pulling C. to get her to do what big sister wants. C. has learned that when this happens, big sister gets yelled at. From time-to-time, I’ll hear C. shrieking and run into the room and start yelling at M., only to find them standing three feet apart, M. with a confused look on her face and C. with an evil grin. She already knows how to work the parents. M. had her first pre-school parent-teacher conference last week. I didn’t go, as C. and I had a date at Gymboree, but S. reported that all is well with our oldest girl. The teacher described M. as a happy child, which is sure better than some of the other things you can be told. Her only complaint was that M. can be a bit stubborn, which made S. laugh. Can’t imagine where she got that from! Apparently when it comes time to pray before meals, M. refuses to put her hands together. Taking after the old man with her healthy distrust of organized religion! She does lag in some motor skills areas, but she is the youngest in her class so that’s not a surprise. She still loves school. She gets excited on Tuesdays and Thursdays when she wakes up and hears that after breakfast and a bath, she’s headed to school to see her friends. We can really see it making a positive difference in her personality and behavior. And her already active imagination has really taken off. Her big thing now is to make “pies,” which pretty much entails putting objects into some kind of container. That might be toys in Tupperware, or leaves and sticks into a bucket. After she has assembled her pie, she likes to say, “Dad, look at this beautiful pie I made for you.” I’m not sure if she got that from the Food Network, which she loves to watch, or from school. Regardless, every pie is beautiful to her. Isn’t that how life should be? I had shared awhile back that she had a bad case of the Whys. The Whys have gotten worse and become a serious bout of the Questions. Why is still her favorite question, but she’ll hit us up with follow-ups. “Why is that dog walking, Dad?” “Because it’s nice outside.” “Well, where did he come from?” Whatever response she gets is greeted with another Why. Hours of fun, let me tell you. She loves to put things off on others, even if she’s the only one around. Quite often at nap or bed time, she’ll stay awake and play for awhile. I’ll go up to tell her to quiet down and go to sleep and find all of her stuffed animals, pillows, and sheets on the ground. She’ll look at me in surprise and say in an equally surprised voice, “Dad! My duckie jumped off the bed and my sheets are on the bed too!” as if she had nothing to do with it. I can’t help but laugh when she does that.