I mentioned yesterday that Evie has her own fun little personality quirks. So now its her turn.

Right now, Evie is all about drawing lines in the sand. Every issue is immediately escalated to some sort of standoff, her vs. the world. Everything is eminently dire.

“If you don’t ___, I’m never EVER going to ___!”

She gets this intensely angry look on her face and you know she has every intention of hurting you (or at least trying). Sometimes this can be funny, because you can see how serious she is, and how seriously angry, but the thing she is angry about is so trivial.

You never really know what is going to set her off. She routinely gets upset about things such as not being able to have “baby moses” and his basket sitting on her chair with her for dinner. And you know she really means business when she says, “I’m going to poke you if you don’t ___” and extends one finger toward you in pure rage. It’s hard to keep a straight face.

These are sort of occasional though, most of the time it is plenty easy to keep a straight face, like when she is having a screaming meltdown in a restaurant because her water wasn’t placed in the proper location. No, then it is plenty easy to keep from laughing.

Sometimes I start to wonder if she’s going to have any good memories of me at all, because it seems like all we do is fight and struggle with each other.

The funny thing is, if you didn’t know how old she was, you’d think maybe I was describing a teenager, with all the constant power struggles and bold declarations. So god help us when we get to that stage, because if she is this difficult except with more power to actually do anything about her situation in life, I can only imagine how impossible that will be.

As far as Evie and Oliver go, we are now starting to see some heavy competition over toys. Oliver now has an interest in what Evie is doing (after all, she does seem to always have the best toys). Oliver doesn’t understand things like sharing, and Evie understands them well enough to know that she doesn’t want anything to do with it. All toys are hers (even Oliver’s toys) and she’s ALWAYS using them, even when she’s not.

For his part, Oliver has taken the only road left to him: appealing to the judges. As soon as she grabs something he has, he *immediately* cries and looks at Sara or I with an imploring look that says, “Do you see how I am being wronged here?” He does this even when he is doing the wronging. And hey, who can blame him? It’s about the only possibility he has of winning the fight, and it works most of the time. I’d like to let them settle things between themselves for the long run, but at the moment it is pretty hard to ignore that imploring look, especially when I know that Evie is not yet quite old enough to understand that Oliver is a person too.