39 month update

Physical: She is trying to skip, do the splits and open the doorknob to the outside. She has not mastered the last one yet - wont squeeze it AND turn at the same time. She still locks and unlocks the other knobs in the house and can open and close them fine. She is insisting pulling her own pants up once we help her get her legs in - and I always make her pick her own clothes out of the drawers and push them back in. Sometimes she puts her own clothes in the hamper and cycles through several pairs of socks a day, that way -- pulling them off and putting them in the hamper and then crying loudly about needing new socks less than an hour later. Better about letting me wash and brush her hair and about participating with washing face and hands. We wash hands before breakfast and lunch and she has to get her stairstool and most of the time I ask her to put it back under the big table before we go upstairs. She has picked up some mannerisms I'll include here - sitting down with her back to us and folding her arms when she is acting defiant - and also walking away after we didn't understand something and doing this odd half-turn while trailing her foot and stretching out her hand palm up as if she is saying to some imaginary person 'I told them...' She is so dramatic, it is hilarious sometimes. She plays 'baseball' with anything resembling a bat and a ball. If she is hitting she does a fairly good job but counts any connection as a 'good job I hit it.' If she is 'pitching' she does a little whirly windup with sound effects and then pitches in an approximate direction. That cracks me up.

Language: Continued explosion from last month - sentences are more complete and she has more ideas she wants to express. 'Oh boy goody goody goody' when she likes something. Yesterday when she wanted me out of bed much too early she said among other things 'come come little feet - come with downstairs!' That is something I tell HER when we are ready to go downstairs (the little feet part). She is also telling me 'don't want' to a lot of things, which is hard to tell apart from what she DOES want, sometimes, especially when the 'don't is quiet. She'll tell me 'don't touch that' about my computer keyboard. She has long discussions with and between her toys. Her Grandma doll is in the ice cream shop of the tiny town right now saying she wants to go to the library very loudly. She describes things by their color (red shirt) and is more interested in what makes a 'boy' again - she thinks it is a ball cap and will often point to a man wearing a hat in the store and say he is a boy. Sometimes she will call herself a 'red girl' if she is wearing a red shirt - and mumum is a grey girl in my grey jacket and so on and so forth. She cracked me up last week when she was playing with toys and one of them needed saving - she pointed one finger up and said 'da da de da!' and something about up and up and away to the save him. She is picking things up faster than we can remember where they are from, now.

Reasoning Skills/Imagination: People who have met her or read my Facebook posts say she has a very big imagination for her age. She also still gives us imaginary somethings and talks away with them and puts them into her games. She still amazes me with her ability to put connections together. Some examples: the chain magnetically attaching to the letters in the bucket - so the letters are fish now and she somehow knows that only the chain does that - and only to the letters, without a lot of investigation. She found her baby doll and the bottle and expanded the game by having mama mousie give the bottle to the baby, which was difficult as the bottle was twice as large as mama mouse! A little skateboard she got last week in a thrift store package and she immediately has all her toys riding it around, doing 'tricks', falling down and then today she hung it by the front wheels off the top of her dollhouse and had all the toys coming to ask 'what are you doing - what is going on HERE?' When I am sewing and show her what I am making and she likes it - she stops bugging me incessantly and lets me sew, and sometimes even HELPS (like handing me pins to put in the sleeve of Lizzie's dress). But then she told me her dress was pretty she was wearing and wouldn't put it to try on (not sure if she understood it was for someone else - she might have, by the time it was done).

Reading/Numbers/Etc.: Counting better, not missing 9,10 as much. She sort of understands addition and subtraction on some level but isn't sure how I know what the number will be without counting. Reading is about the same - she recognizes her sight words and anything that looks like them is mistaken until she learns it. We have tried a little 'decoding' of small words but she still is seeing even 3-letter words as sight words. She has a lot of time yet and as long as she is interested I'll keep doing it here and there. She does still bring me the letter box at times. Her copying skills in building, singing songs, playing new games etc are really improving. She was playing games at the library and got every letter right on the letter train (which she has done for a long time) but then went to the coloring screen and got the idea quite quickly that every little missed area needed to be caught carefully and filled in. Her dexterity with the no-click mouse on that game is very good. She still needs patience and encouragement to do any click game, which usually she gets mad about.

Other: I am amused and surprised by her sense of justice still. She wants everyone to go to bed and get up at the same time, all the animals to get a bite of the end of the food, always wants to get five small candies or three jellybeans and looks jilted when (mom usually) gives her less. Her jellybean bank gave her two jellybeans 'for the price of one' the other day and she brought one of them to me and told me it was for me. Yet she says I can't eat when I get home and she has already eaten - because 'I gotta play with you! No eat Mumum!' and doesn't understand or care because it is happening at a different time and she isn't hungry. These are the usual causes of her tantrums - she is trying to assert control over something, won't listen to the reasoning we have and we just go ahead and do it anyway - leaving her to cry until she straightens up and realizes she isn't the boss. Her empathy is developing more, when I am sick and she finally stops trying to drag me up and starts to copy Daddy in how to take care of me (feel forehead, tuck in, make me drink etc). But this morning I was having a dizzy spell and she was trying to make a fuss on the stairs (not good) so I told her I was going to leave her there and get her cereal or she could come with me. She went to Daddy and told him Mumum was 'broken' and he needed to come help. He was worried I had fallen - but in truth, I just wasn't acting the way she wanted me to or expected me to!