little bits and pieces

This morning Esme made me laugh really hard. She has been asking me to make penguins out of playdough - a daddy penguin and a baby. The daddy needs a 'hat' - she says. They eat donuts, she says. The donuts get cooked in the oven of the dollhouse. She took the 'daddy' penguin over to the calendar that is still up from last month, which has stickers of penguins wearing hats. She holds him up next to the other penguins and compares my 'work of art' to those -- gets an odd look on her face, then starts telling me they have hats and this 'penguin' needs a hat. But she was definitely trying to see what the similarity was between the two that made them both penguins.

We also made bunny rabbits and elephants, mothers and babies, yesterday of playdough. She asks for what she wants - and I try to make it. All the mothers and babies introduced each other, gave hugs and played ball. She told the baby elephant it could fly - and it said it didn't know how. So she went and dug around in her room until she found her mumum angel wing cow and it gave the baby lessons. Later at night she dug around in her room again and found the 'baby' cow she got for her birthday and the mumum and baby cow had donuts in the dollhouse and did a lot of playacting falling down, feeding, going to sleep etc etc. Her playacting between moms and dads and babies is SO cute - hugs and help and daily routine.

She is taking another language leap - more in understanding and some in spoken. She understood what I meant about her soup being too hot that is why I gave her dry cereal beside it to eat until it got 'not hot'. She was fussing about it being hot and stopped, thought about what I said, and said 'oh okay...' and started to eat the cereal. Last night it was too cold in the bathroom for a full bath and she threw a HUGE fit about that - as expected.. but after she said her pajamas were warm upstairs I reminded her I was saying she needed her pajamas because the bathroom was too cold.. and she stopped, looked me in the eyes, and hugged me in an odd clinging 'I'm limp but don't let me go' way for a while before calming right down.

Her baby kitty woke her up in the middle of the night by rubbing up against her. She does this often. I told Mark to take a look, as the cat was demanding attention from the sleeping girl. The kitty and her tried about three different positions and then Esme, still half-asleep, said something incomprehensible, picked the cat up and threw her on the floor, pulled her blankets back around herself, and went back to sleep. The cat crept back up and settled at her feet smugly. Mark and I both laughed as quietly as we could so we wouldn't wake her up.

This morning her frog had fallen out of bed and she told him 'oh.. don't worry, don't worry, I've got you little one. There. You go sleep.' and put him back on her pillow. She has been saying 'Now I've got you!' in a dramatic voice often to her toys during playfights. She repeats a lot of strange cartoon things out of her old Disney and warner brothers cartoons, including tom and jerry and mickey mouse and donald duck etc.. Mark has collections that go all over the place - 1940s and up. Esme likes baseball and was repeating the 'windup' from a goofy short the other day to Grandpa, but she wouldn't do it for Grandma and I. She also saw a tree across the legs of someone in a cartoon and did that to me at home with the broom saying 'I stuck I stuck - a tree fall down and I stuck!' I rolled my eyes at her but laughed.

She also had her army men after the dragon yesterday. But the dragon isn't always mean - and I had one of the army men make up with the dragon, give him hugs and tell the other army men not to be mean to him. She wasn't sure what to do with that - but after a few minutes she got on board and the dragon was a nice dragon who licked the army men and the dragon was dancing to her music box. He opened it with his nose, so she opened it with her nose the next time.

I really love her imagination, her compassion and her very very sweet nature.