Sometimes I forget that I’ve posted things about the kids to Facebook and not shared here as well. Thus, your obligatory, periodic update on the girls.
M. is secretly Canadian.* Or at least she talks like a Canuck. We have no idea why, but she says the words house, mouse, out, mouth, etc. as if she’s from Ontario. We don’t know any Canadians. As far as we know there are no native Canadians in her class. One of her teachers does speak with a heavy accent, but she’s from Indonesia which, as far as I know, does not share any linguistic traits with our neighbors to the north. Regardless of the source, it makes us laugh every time she does it. Sometimes she’s confused as to why we’re laughing and repeating her words. Others she just goes along with it. When she was 2-3 she had a faux southern accent, so I suppose it’s just another phase.
(I doubt many of you understand the reference there. There’s a record company in Bloomington called Secretly Canadian.)
She’s lost another tooth, one of the top, front teeth, and its neighbor is quite loose as well. You really notice when those top teeth come out. She looks like an alien sometimes.
Her other exciting news is how she’s picked up reading. Each Thursday she brings a book home from school that they’ve practiced that week, and her homework is to read it to us over the weekend. That’s impressive, but they are simple books and she’s been working on them for four straight days at school. What was more amazing, and frankly a little weird, was when she picked up one of her learning to read books we have at home and calmly worked her way through it. It was one of those parenting moments that made me proud as hell but also freaked me out quite a bit. My little girl is reading!
C. is C.. She’s the most delightful kid in the world one minute and she’s a total disaster the next. Is it a middle child thing? She’ll come up to you, tell you that she loves you, give you hugs and kisses and cuddle up with you. Then, when you tell her that we’re all out of a snack she wants, she’ll throw a 30-minute fit. It’s extremely tiring to still be going through this multiple times each day, especially with L. developing an attitude.
Like most three year olds, C. does not deal with disappointment well. Recently the girls’ school had a carnival, full of games, face painting, treats, etc. One game was the Cupcake Walk. The kids walked around a circle as music played, and when it stopped, they landed on a number. Three numbers were picked from a hat and the kids standing on those numbers got cupcakes. M. won right away. C. went around the circle twice and was not one of the six numbers picked.* When I explained that the game was over and she could try later when they did it again, she burst into tears. She assumed you walk around the circle, you get a cupcake. Fortunately, she was the last of the winners the next time she played. I was going to have to take some other kid’s cupcake away if she didn’t win.
(The first time, she and M. landed on the same number. I told her to move to an open number, thinking it wasn’t cool to have more than one kid on a number. Naturally, there were more kids than numbers, so doubling-up was not a problem. M. wins, C. does not. More points in my Father of the Year standings!)
C.’s developing her imagination. She’s reached the imaginary story play stage, and will sit with her toys, books, or crayons talking out huge, involved scenarios as she plays or reads or colors. It’s always funny to hear three year olds take all the things they know about and put them into a story together, even if they have nothing to do with each other.
L. is still a lot of fun, but as I mentioned, she’s getting an attitude. When she doesn’t like something or can’t communicate what she wants, she lets you know. Throw in a new round of teething and she has some beastly moments.
Fortunately she is still mostly perfect and we’re enjoying these final days of that phase. She loves giving hugs and kisses. Anytime you pick her up, she wraps her arms around you and pats you. She used to wait to get a kiss to give one back, now she leans over and kisses us unprompted.
She loves to dance. The big sisters have kind of moved beyond “Party in the USA,” but she still loves it. Anytime she hears it, she throws her hands up and begins dancing around in a circle. Sometimes she just wants to hear it, so she throws her hands up and give us a pleading look until we sing to her. She then smiles and shakes her shoulders.
She also has a hungry dance. If she sees you with food, or is just hungry and you happen to be in the kitchen, she’ll walk towards you making all kinds of horrible “I’m hungry but can’t communicate my hunger to you in words” noises. When you ask if she’s hungry or if she wants an apple/cookie/cracker, she’ll nod her head and start doing a half dance, half stomp with just her right foot. It’s not an angry stomp, there’s a rhythm to it, and she shakes her hips a little, so I kind of like it. If we could just stop the noises.
One of the amusing/aggravating thing about having kids are the rathole conversations you end up in. An innocent comment will kick off 20 minutes of questions that you never saw coming. Friday night, as we were driving back from my in-laws’, M. mentioned that her class had written letters to people in Haiti. We asked what she wrote, who they were sending them to, etc. Next thing you know she and C. are asking 1000 questions about Haiti and earthquakes.
“Why do they have so many earthquakes in Haiti?”
“Why did so many people get hurt?”
“Why do earthquakes happen?”
“Why didn’t our house get hurt when we had an earthquake?”*
Other parents know that when you answer any of these questions honestly, you’re just inviting more questions. S. made the mistake of giving an honest, scientific explanation for earthquakes. That really got the girls going. After about ten minutes of that discussion, C. brought it all together.
“I think it was a giant worm that made the earth move. Or maybe a raccoon.”
We couldn’t help but laugh that her take on plate tectonics is that it’s a large animal that is causing the ruckus.
(We had a minor quake a couple years back that woke everyone at about 5:00 am.)
❖