Let Her Eat Cake!

Happy 3rd Birthday to my Moira! Here's to hoping that you had the terrible two's and that three will be better than two! (I wish I were kidding, but these last 6 months have been quite difficult for us both.)

This birthday's focus was on CAKE.Not presents, or balloons, or attention. Cake- with pink and purple flowers. Lucky for her, Pop came to visit in the morning so we had cake after lunch to include him. Pink cake with purple icing, and pink and purple flowers. She happily blew out her candles and then ate the icing off her cake. Kaylon and I wonder if we just shouldn't hand her a tub of icing next year...

While her stubborn streak and somewhat defiant nature are a daily challenge, her positive characteristics outweigh the "challenging" ones. She is smart, passionate, curious, loving, funny- above all funny. We have to constantly keep ourselves from laughing when she's supposed to be in trouble. I love big, beautiful eyes, that have not quite settled on a color (right now they are a bluish green). I love how simply heartbreaking she looks when she's disappointed or hurt- I know that sounds cruel, but you should just see her shoulders slump and her big eyes drop- I promise you, you'd want to give her the world to make it better. (This picture is more angry than sad, but it gives you an idea...)And as much as it frustrates me now, I love to imagine the strong woman she will be some day because of her "challenging" traits- she will not be someone to mess with!
So Happy Birthday Moira. Mommy loves you!

Tooth Fairy

The tooth fairy has been a bit flighty at our house. So flighty that she has never come on the night that Grace lost her tooth. Yeah, I'm pretty sure she forgot, although maybe it's true what we told Grace- that she was just so busy that she didn't get there in time. Luckily Grace was understanding and she was prepared 2 nights ago to awake to a tooth instead of money in the morning (again). But the tooth fairy must be doing better since she left Grace a gold dollar on the same night that Grace lost her tooth! Or maybe she made her husband set an alarm so that she wouldn't forget. Whatever it was, I'm happy that Grace's tooth, small paper blanket, and note were retrieved on time, this time.

Passive Aggressive

Moira doesn't know how to spell yet, though she does know the names of most letters. She likes to pretend that she does, though, and she often yells out or types random letters to 'spell' words. She just told me that she was going to type Violet's name into her MobiGo, which I thought was pretty sweet. Then as I walked away I heard her type the first three letters:

P...O...S

hehe

Living in a Cartoon

I went to the store over the MLKJ holiday and took only Liliana with me so that we could have some one on one time. She was helping me check off items on my list at the end when we discovered that we had missed the baby food aisle. As we were heading back that way Liliana saw a parallel between our predicament and a certain cartoon character that often goes in search of things. So how could she resist belting out the song to go with it?

Come on Vamanos! Everybody let's go...
Where are we going? (clap clap clap) to get the baby food!

She sang the whole song- including the Spanish phrases. We passed several adults who smiled at her indulgently. I wonder if we had passed some kids if they would have joined in?

My Future Delinquent

So I'm sure that many of you know about the traffic light behavior system in kindergarten- green being good, yellow is a warning, and red is bad. Liliana has done fairly well this year- I can count on one hand the times that she has been on yellow, and she's never gotten on red before- until today...

Going through her backpack after school I pulled out a form with an attached envelope that caught my eye. Many different ideas of what it could be flitted through my head before I comprehended exactly what it was: a notice that Liliana had been on red that day, with an attached envelope of her hair that she had cut off with scissors when she was supposed to be doing school work. To make matters even worse it was noted that she lied to teacher when asked if she was cutting her hair (her response: I don't know).

We had a good talk- I asked her why she did it, and she revealed that her best friend in the class had done it too (I won't even try to guess who came up with the idea). I was firm- grounding her from electronics for the day, but I cuddled her when it was over because I knew how sad and embarrassed she was. I told her that she needs to apologize to her teacher tomorrow for lying to her, and that she is never to cut her hair by herself again.

I'll take a picture tomorrow so I can post the damage. Still not sure if I can hide the hole or if she needs a new very short hairstyle.

Crawling!

We have full fledged crawling! I was checking my email when I looked up and there she was- on her knees moving across the floor. Nothing is safe anymore- she loves being able to move around and get into whatever she wants; and I love watching her get excited about her freedom!

Potty Training #3

We are on day two of potty training for Moira. I was going to do it during the Christmas break so that I could have Kaylon's help, but the whole puking/sick for half the week thing messed that up. So when the diapers ran out this week, I told Moira that there were no more and that it was time to wear panties. She gets a penny every time she goes (way cheaper than candy!). She has pushed back a little, but mostly likes the idea. At this point she doesn't get to decide- I'm done changing her diapers!

Sentimental Moments

When I heard this song (from the Breaking Dawn Soundtrack) it made me think of my girls and how fundamentally they have changed my life. So I got all sappy and sat down to make a picture montage of them. They LOVED it- they laughed as they pointed to each other's baby pictures. And I got a visual display of how much I love being a mom.