Three point three nine years.

It occurred to me that I haven’t done any kind of post about Olivia’s development lately.  This is a journal after all, so I figure I’d better get us up-to-date!

Olivia at three years, four (almost five) months:

- Hi, my daughter is a vegetarian.  I mean, not all the way since she’ll eat seafood, but everything else is out.  She is always exclaiming, “No!  I don’t like meat!!” whenever we are in any proximity to chicken or beef.  Just yesterday at our family dinner, she was becoming frantic about other people putting meat on their own plates.   “No!  They are going to give me that meat!”  Like everyone was conspiring against her.  (should I also note that she’s paranoid?)

-  She has been increasingly interested in numbers, letters, and telling time, lately.  She is always asking what time it is and peering at the clock after I tell her.  She will climb onto our kitchen table to stand right next to it and point out the big and little hands.  “The little hand is pointing at the four, and the BIG hand is pointing at the seven!  That means it’s four seven!”  And I usually let that stand, because have you ever tried to explain counting by fives, while pointing to random numbers that have no bearing on the actual numbers you’re counting, to a three year old?  I can hardly explain it to myself most of the time.  She just looks at me like I’m crazy and says, “No, no.  It’s four seven.  See?  Four and seven!” 

- Olivia shocked me a few weeks ago when she held up her fingers and told me, “Hey!  One plus one is two!”  I was like, what?!  And also, good job!  And also, where did you learn that, because I never taught you that!  And then she’s all, “And one plus one plus one is three!”  Repeat my shocked sentiments, and THEN she said,  “And three plus one plus one is five!”  And I almost died.  I’m glad I didn’t because that would have been the lamest, but where did she learn that???  I am not a super awesome teach-her-everything mom.  She is just picking things up all around her.  It’s the craziest.  So now we’re (kind of) actively working on math, because apparently she can do it.  Ohhhh, I hope she got her dad’s natural math abilities.  The same thing happened with her name, by the way.  She asked me how to draw the ‘v’ and the ‘a’, but the other letters she just figured out on her own and then one day she decided writing her name was a good idea.  And I will (maybe) stop bombarding you with pictures of her drawings one of these days, but I kind of can’t help it. 

- Her greatest desire in life is to have a pet.  She is always asking me for the most random pets.  “Mom, can I have a pet termite?”  “Can one day I have a pet kangaroo?”  “Can I have a pet ladybug?”  “Can I maybe have a pet lion?”  And then I have to explain to her why all of those things wouldn’t make very good pets.  She was adamant about the termite.  “But I will bring him wood from a tree outside so he won’t eat our house!  And cheese!” 

-  Since she’s been talking for such a long time, there aren’t many words she doesn’t know.  Today she was telling me, “I have the most MAAAAGnificent idea!”  or  “Mom, that was spectacular!”  You know, stuff like that.  But there are a few words she still mispronounces and I hope she never stops.  No matter what, she cannot say ‘happening’ correctly.  It’s always ‘happen-nee-ning’.  “What’s happen-nee-ning?!”  and “Ooooh, no.  This is NOT happen-nee-ning!”  And she can never get Kit Kat right.  And yes, we live in a house where Kit Kat is said frequently enough to notice such a thing.  “Can I have a Sik Sak?”  I was pretty sad the day she figured out that it’s ‘door knob’, not ‘nor-dob’. 

-  I can’t get over her creativity.  I am not a creative person, I will tell you right now.  I am never coming up with fancy ideas, and I’ve accepted it.  It is so fun to watch her solving problems and inventing ways to make things work.  The other day she had this idea (are you ready for this?) where I would hang a ball from the doorway using a string.  I would tie it at the top, she told me.  Then, she would pull her carseat over (it was randomly not in the car),  and sit in it, buckled, while I would swing the ball back and forth, almost hitting her and telling her that she was trapped.  Now, I am not the biggest fan of, like, torture and stuff, so I wasn’t too excited about strapping my child into her carseat while swinging a ball at her head and cackling.  I told her, “Oh, your carseat won’t stand by itself.  Sorry.  Let’s play a different game!”  She cocked her head, thought for a bit, then said, “Oh!  I will get a chair from the kitchen and put it behind it!  That will hold my seat up!”  So she did.  It worked perfectly.  She has lots of other ideas that don’t involve horrifying circumstances, but that one stands out in my mind for obvious reasons.  

-  She is obsessed, no wait, I’d better write that correctly, she is O-B-S-E-S-S-E-D with bubbles.  We spend all of our time blowing bubbles lately.  I’ve made three batches in the last week!  (she also accidently dumps them pretty much every time.)  (good thing they’re cheap to make.)

Can you tell she is laughing?  I love this picture so much.

p.s. I am desperately trying to keep those flowers next to her alive.  They are so obstinate!  Like, what kind of plant actually wilts when it’s in the sun?  Every time I pull it back in the house, it gets all enthusiastic, but when I put it outside to help it photosythesize, it throws a fit!  You can see it pouting in all of these pictures.  This goes against everything I’ve ever known about plants.  Sun=nutrients=vivacious plants, right?  Not right.  So I’ve been keeping it inside and it loves its life now. 

She is so skinny lately.  Did you know that after she got her tonsils out, she was down to 24 pounds??  That is little for an almost three and a half year old.  She has gained most of her weight back by now (28-29ish lbs), but her little tummy is practically concave.

She is always mad at me when it’s time to go inside.

But then another day rolls around and we are out blowing them again.

With only a camera phone handy, obviously.

Olivia is the sneakiest.  Friday morning, I was maybe distracted.  I can’t remember what I was doing, talking to Isaac, perhaps?, but anyway, she’d been quiet for a while, coming back and forth from the kitchen, then crawling underneath our corner table in between couches.  At one point I glanced at her, “Nothing, Mom!”  before I even said anything.  Her little hands were behind her back.  “What are you doing?”  “I have NOTHING in my hands.”  Then she crept past me.  When she turned her back to me, I saw that she had four or five Oreos in her hands.  I walked around to see just what she was up to.  And found this:

She’d been stealing Oreos, then eating the frosting out and discarding them.  She even got herself a drink.  I blogged about a similar situation with Ritz cracker sandwiches, if you remember.  But I cared so much more about this!  I’m glad I caught her before she ate the stack I saw in her hands.  It was the most egregious waste of Oreos I’ve ever seen. 

Little baby Thomas was blessed on Sunday and I barely took any pictures, if you can believe it.

Here’s Thomas with his dad:

And here he is looking terribly alarmed with my two grandmas:

He is the cutest.

You know who else is the cutest?

Her:

This post took me 3 hours to write.  Gosh, I hope it doesn’t take you that long to read it.