Four and a half

I've been a bad blogger lately (how many of us start posts with that line...?).  Especially when it comes to chronicling my Juju.  I also started a journal to write down some of the funny things she says but there again I'm not very regular about doing it.  Sometimes you just have to be in the moment without trying to "capture" it.  Or something about the light or the purity of that moment tells you you're not going to forget it anyway.

But I've sort of got a chronicler's soul so I'll recap the highlights of this four and a half-year old.  She can be funny as all get out.  Like the time she told me quite seriously she was going to the bathroom and that I should stay in the living room and do some "activities" and that she would be right back.  I don't where the heck she could have picked that up.  (Yes, it's me.)

Or how she tells me her African American Fisher Price figurine and the blond-haired one are "brudders" cause they both have blue shirts.  On the subject of brothers she told me she wants a "brudder" who speaks French and a sister who speaks English.  Hmmm.

She might need to learn to share a bit more anyway, cause just last Saturday she whined nearly all the walk home because I split a cookie with her instead of giving her the whole thing.  "I want the other part..." was her mantra for at least five minutes.

She likes to let her hair tickle her back when she takes a bath and as she arches her head back she'll tell me hair is getting long.  In fact since it's curly it's still shoulder length.  I've only cut her bangs about three times in her life and the back only once to get rid of some split ends.

Lately she's into making her dolls, or rather making me make her dolls talk.  I am told to make Rapunzel and Flynn talk and if I don't do it fast enough or constantly, she'll whine in the way only little children can. And though I treasure the moments playing with her, sometimes when she says this it's like the proverbial knife being brandished in a horror movie moment, with suspenseful shrieking music in the background.  Because I am totally out of inspiration to make her dollies talk and just want to veg....

Luckily my little girl has been well trained by (guess who again?) me to enjoy being "cozy on the couch."  From a young age I would say, come on, let's rest on the couch.  And sometimes to coax me into playing with her dolls she'll put pillows on the carpet for me or suggest we play on the couch. She also loves for me to stroke her hair on the couch. "Do it every day, mommy," she'll say.

She sometimes astounds us with her wisdom then says things that remind us she's still just a little girl.  And though she has her Runaway Bunny moments where she says she wants to fly away from me and that I'm "not her friend" (a major pre-school insult), usually by the evening she's come around again.  And she'll say sweetly, "Mommy, you be the mommy and I'll be the baby."  Those are roles I'm perfectly fine with.