Evie, laughing: “Aunt Rachael…cracking me up!”

Me: “Oliver, your big sister put her hair in the water all by herself.”
Oliver: “Mfgh!”
Me: “He said, ‘wow!'”
Evie, skeptically: “I’ll take your word for it…”

Evie is really learning how to use her words. She can be encouraging, as in “Good job hurrying Grandma!” when we are trying to get out the door. She can be so polite when she wants to, such as “Daddy, thank you for the big fork, but I would prefer a small fork.” On the other hand, she can also be not-so-polite, as in “I said I wanted strawberries, how dare!”

Evie had to go to the ear doctor a lot before she got her tubes in her ears. We tried to think of ways to make the visit a little more fun, and the ear doctor came up with the game of looking in her ear and seeing who was in there. “I see Elmo in this ear!” Evie got a big kick out of that. I’m still not sure if she understood that Elmo actually wasn’t in her ear. But anyway, we continue the game to this day, when we are doing checkups with her doctor kit.

Evie: “And in your ears daddy, I see…hair.”

You have to take a lot of abuse as a parent.