Raising a character

As much as I think I’m doing the best I can to beat ‘normal’ into my kid, it’s just not happening. Sure, she acts like a 2 year old, but she’s also at times, goofy, moochy, lovey, and many more adjectives. I’d hate to forget all these things as she grows.

She’s so moochy. Look at her trying to steal tea out of her dad’s glass. Look at the look on his face, which clearly says ‘here we go again’. It’s not just drinks, either. She’ll come and grab something right off your plate, out of your hand if she manage it. You’d think I didn’t feed her, but that’s not true. It’s barely 7 and she’s got a little plastic container of raisins, peanuts and cereal in her lap.  She’ll have something else later, that was just to let me get my eyes open for the day.  She’ll easily have 3 meals and 3 snacks. At her doctors appt in November they said she weighed 28 lbs. Our scale still said 25 until the other day. Looks like she’s gained about 2 lbs over the winter. Assuming she won’t get weighed any other time, we’ll find out next Halloween how much she’s gained in the year. She’s definitely heavy, but also tall for her age.  However, it’s evenly distributed, so her pants fit in length but are super baggy at the waist. Which was fine when she was wearing fluffy diapers and is a pain right now, her pants keeping pulling her underwear down and making us say, ‘I can see your buttcrack’, so now she’s picked that up. Nice. Of course, she also says ‘thank you’ and pulls up her pants in reaction to that remark, so just goes to show she’s learning something, even if it’s tacky!

Goofy. The child is goofy. More often than not, she’ll grab this container and run around with it on her head. However, she still tries to get into it sometimes. ‘Umm, kid, you’re too big. No really, you’re too big.’ ‘Owww, mommy, it hurt me.’ ‘Yeah, I’m sure it did, I told you that you didn’t fit.’ I have a hard time with giving the kid sympathy when she clearly ignored what I said, but I realize that she’s 2. If she’s still doing it at 5, I may just laugh at her!

I have a hard time coming to grips with my kid’s imagination. I might show her something once, and she’ll just go from there. She’s a character. She put this car together by herself. Seriously, I could work for 10 minutes with blocks and not make something that is so simple that just LOOKS like a car and I’m an adult. I’m not mechanically inclined or anything. Apparently, she’s got some of her dad’s skills, which is awesome! She’ll line up her animals and talk to them, moving them around, turning them to all face the same way. I have no idea what she’s doing, but she is INTENT. She’ll also say things like ‘mommy, Keeley play puz? yes? okay!’ –umm, apparently mommy doesn’t get a say in it. Multiply that for things she wants to eat, do, etc. etc. Not sure how she came about that particular series of words, but it is terribly cute!

She also has a pretty darn good memory and says a lot of words that we’ve never strictly taught her, but we’ve read to her out of books, and so on.  I have a great video of this, but shockwave keeps crashing. How about this instead?

She ripped this out of the packaging and said ‘diaper’  right away. However, if you show her a disposable diaper or pull up, she’ll tell you what’s on it and ask if she can color it like a coloring book.  They have some on the toilet at church, that’s how I know! If you show her a picture of a baby with one on it’s hiney, she’ll say diaper, but just a picture of one, forget it, she ignores it, and points to all the pretty, cloth diapers instead. Here, here, and here. Lol.  She doesn’t know what McDonald’s is, either. However, she does know that there’s awesome music and you get chicken from the Mexican restaurant. I guess it’s all exposure, right? I think we’ve only eaten in there twice, but she’s gone in probably half a dozen times for take out with Matt.

We really can’t wait for people to get a jump on her latest trick ‘reading’. Like I said, her memory is sharp. The video I couldn’t post is of a book talking all about food, basically. It goes through several things, and she just ‘reads’ like it’s nothing. It would probably fool quite a few people, it’s super comical. She also remembers if I spell things for her. She has a shirt that has ‘peace’ on it. I read her the letters once and since then, she’s been reading them every time she wears it. She spells them out and then says PEACE! with a huge smile on her face. So far most people we run across think she’s around 3.

She’s also definitely very lovey. Despite her Irish name, she kisses like the French. One kiss on each cheek, and a hug. What you thought I meant with tongue? Lol. She has started just this week saying ‘I love you’ more frequently. Sometimes, without us saying it first. Kind of warms the cockles of your heart (if your heart had cockles).  She and Matt went out to play the other day and she said ‘bye bye mommy I love you’ and blew me a kiss on her way out. A-dore-bell!

So yes I’m raising a character. She throws tantrums, she climbs into her crib, she wants to carry her animals everywhere, even to the toilet. She wants to ‘sleep’ in mommy and daddy’s bed — aka tear up the sheets by rearranging her animals and fake snoring, only to rearrange again 2 minutes later. She doesn’t want to stop playing at church, she’d rather just stay there in the nursery forever, and she says ‘my church’ if we drive by it. She’s saying ‘octagon and rectangle’ stumblingly and circle  is nearly perfect. She confuses pentagon sometimes, but it’s only a matter of time. We’ve got a fun little kid on our hands. Oh and everyone outside of this house thinks she’s really well behaved. Ah ha, ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. She’s 2. She’s not perfect, but we love her.