Evie Update

Evie the Bold

/ Shane / 3 Comments

We took a quick day trip to nearby Indiana Dunes on Sunday to do some hiking and playing on the beach. They have a surprising number of nature programs and hikes, so we decided to check out a few while we were there.

The first program of the day sort of set the tone for the whole thing. It was sort of a “creepy” tour of the dunes, including various stories about the things that happened there (including a skeleton buried in one of the dunes and a ghost who walks the dunes by night), finally ending in their very own “pet cemetery”, a place where they found little tombstones and a crematorium that they can’t explain. To be fair, the ambiance was a little lacking, and it really couldn’t have been less creepy, but I was nervous that this would be a little much, especially with her uneasy feelings about monsters lately. However, she seemed to be mostly unaffected by the stories, other than to ask us 100 times if A) we knew where the ghost was hiding during the day, and B) if we could go looking for said ghost. She was absolutely sure she was going to see this ghost come strolling down the beach in broad daylight, in front of 30 people, on the sunniest, most gorgeous day in months.

She even made me tell my own ghost story on the way home.

After some beach time, and a restaurant with really awful service, we just barely managed to make it to the afternoon program, which was “creature feeding”. Now, in all honesty, I was sort of envisioning something outside, maybe throwing some seed out on the ground and trying to attract some birds or squirrels or something. What I didn’t really count on was reptiles.

Even feeding the turtle was somewhat gruesome, since it really went to town on some worms, blood and guts hanging out of it’s mouth. And when they came around with a snake to touch, I figured Evie would say, “No way!” since she had previously refused to touch a snake at the zoo. Not only did she want to touch the snake, but she insisted on petting the next snake even though the snake was whipping around viciously and the naturalist said nervously, “Okay guys, I’m sorry, I need to put him back in his cage. I think he’s hungry.” Evie was like, “No way, you said I could touch the snake, I’m touching that snake!”

The first snake got an enormous frog, who proceeded to fight and kick as the snake slowly devoured it. (“Butt first!” as Evie is fond of recounting.) Evie couldn’t tear her eyes away. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but it was slightly horrifying, at least to me. Next up was a constrictor, and when the lady asked, “Who wants to put the mouse in?” Evie was jumping up and down saying, “Me! Me!” Naturally, the lady picked an older kid to put the mouse in the cage, after which we all watched the snake constrict the mouse until it stopped moving, and then slowly eat it’s head. This snake moved like lightning too; when it pounced on the mouse, I jumped. It was almost too quick to see.

So, finally it came time for the big enchilada: the poisonous rattle snake. This thing is in a super cage with shatter-proof glass in the front and padlocks on top, it’s so dangerous. “Who wants to put the mouse in?” comes the question and “Me! Me!” comes the answer. I couldn’t believe that the lady actually picked her! There were teenagers standing there, but she went with the 3 year old! I guess she could see how much Evie really wanted to do it. “Uh…Sara?” I called, since Sara wasn’t paying attention and didn’t know this was going on.

Sure enough, Evie took the mouse by the tail and gleefully dropped him to his doom with the waiting rattler down below. She did it perfectly. I can assure you, it was every parent’s dream moment. Unfortunately (?), the snake wasn’t feeling hungry, and he left her mouse alone. We practically had to drag her out of there, since she was glued to the front of the cage, waiting for the mouse to be devoured.

I should also mention that, somewhere in there, the frog being eaten by the first snake burst open, and there were literally blood and guts hanging out of it’s side while it still futilely tried to escape. The naturalist said she’d never seen that before. Must have been our lucky day.

It was absolutely amazing to me that there was such a program. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone feed a living animal to a snake, much less did I see such a thing when I was in preschool. It was awful and yet awesome at the same time. I certainly would have enjoyed seeing that as a (slightly-older-than-Evie) kid. And even more surprising was that Evie took it all in stride. She was enjoying it as much as any of the older kids. I kept vacillating between being proud of her and wondering what was wrong with her. 🙂

Did I mention our 3 year old daughter fed a live mouse to a poisonous rattle snake??

Let’s just hope this doesn’t come back to bite us later on down the road with some kind of terrible nightmares!

Bold Declarations

/ Shane / 1 Comment

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.

The best Easter egg hunt ever

/ Shane / Leave a comment

On Saturday we signed up for an Easter egg hunt over at the community garden. We thought Evie would have a good time. We had no idea.

So it turned out that only one other kid showed up for the Easter egg hunt, besides Evie. There were 50 eggs hidden around the neighborhood park. For those of you following around at home, that’s 25 eggs per kid. This is WAY more eggs than you usually get to grab at a thing like this. There were eggs everywhere, and Evie could hardly pick them up fast enough. And there was no competition for the eggs, no egg tug-of-wars, no big kids abusing little kids, more eggs than a 3 year old could imagine.

Another kid showed up about 30 minutes later, and I’m not sure if  he was there for the egg hunt or not, but we felt bad for him watching Evie gloating over her hoard of colored eggs like a dragon over treasure. When Evie wasn’t looking, we would take them out of her basket and re-hide them for this other little boy to find. However, this boy was not prepared for the egg-finding force that was Evie. We would practically hide the egg in his pocket and he would miss it, but not Evie. Her usual focus and determination apparently applies to egg hunts as well. She would re-find them as fast as we re-hid them. So she probably found at least 40 eggs when all was said and done.

After this we had to play Easter egg hunt for the rest of the day at our house. Alternately either hiding eggs from her, or finding eggs that she hid. The eggs contained such treasures as rubber bands or candy that you weren’t allowed to eat. After playing this game with her for a while I discovered A) she’s better at finding eggs than I am, and B) she has a pretty sophisticated idea about where to hide eggs.

An interesting side note, the other kid that showed up for the egg hunt is actually going to be in her class at her new school next year. So that was interesting, and I’m glad to see they got along well.

You can contrast this with the other Easter egg hunt of the weekend, which I think was a pretty typical egg hunt experience. In other words, it was pretty crummy. This egg hunt was after church on Sunday, so first off, Evie is forced to sit through the entire service looking at eggs hiding all around her, but not able to touch them. Naturally, she spent the entire time cataloging every coordinate of every egg in range of our position.

Here’s where the trouble really starts.

Afterwards, the directions were for kids to come to the front and get instructions before looking for eggs. Poor Evie, who’s the most perfect, mature child on the planet who also has terribly mean parents that make her follow the rules, had to go to the front to get the instructions as the rest of the children raped and pillaged all of the eggs in the rest of the church. Second off, people can’t stop trying to hand her eggs during church, which she knows is wrong but is quite a temptation to offer a 3 year old. And might I add that the fun of getting the eggs is finding them, not having them handed to you by and adult.

I know this is something on me, because it’s one of my personal pet peeves, but FOLLOW THE RULES! Who are you that are so important that YOUR precious little monster doesn’t need to follow the rules? Go ahead little Timmy, you’ve waited long enough, you can start a little early. Here little girl, it’s just one egg, what could it hurt. Yes, I understand that it’s just an egg hunt and who really cares, but it is a series of these little things over the course of the lifetime of your child that teaches her that rules don’t matter because she is special and above the rules for some reason.

So naturally, Evie follows the rules and is devastated to find out that all of  her carefully cataloged eggs are gone before she gets back (except for the one I was sitting on and another one I was defending through sheer intimidation). She ends up finding 3 eggs (so one other one that I wasn’t personally defending), even though they planned about a dozen per kid. And kids are walking by taunting her with their piles of 20+ eggs. Most of this stuff went over her head, and she was actually somewhat happy with the ones she found, but she was a little disappointed and it’s only going to get worse as she gets older and becomes more aware of what is going on.

You can see why I liked the first one much better.

As a side note, is there some kind of inflation of candy hidden in Easter eggs? Everywhere we went, the eggs had 2 or 3 pieces of candy in them, basically as much candy as could fit in the eggs. I only remember there being one piece of candy per egg! I had to sneakily go through Evie’s found eggs as quick as I could and remove a bunch of the candy, so she wouldn’t have candy overload (total she had something like 30 eggs with 2 or 3 pieces of candy per egg…I think that’s a little excessive for a kid her age).

Aw man, I just realized, the reason I only remember one piece of candy per egg was that MY parents probably dug through my eggs and removed extra pieces. Oh well, I guess I’m just part of the parenting circle of life.

E is for Evie

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie asked me to write a poem for her, and this is what I wrote:

E is for Evie,
so innocent and sweet.

E is for Everyone,
that Evie likes to meet.

E is for Evelyn,
the woman you’ll become.

E is for Evie,
whose life’s just begun.

Scaredy Cat

/ Shane / 6 Comments

Evie is quite the Nervous Nelly these days.

She is afraid to have her head out of the covers. She has to take a stuffed animal (preferably a big one) to leave her room. She won’t go downstairs by herself, in fact, she won’t go half way down the hallway, even if you’re watching. She won’t be the first one down the stairs or the last one up the stairs. She can’t go to the bathroom by herself, even with the door open and us in the next room. Always, always, there are “monsters”.

I believe that she is truly scared. I spent a lot of time as a child being scared to death. I have a very fertile imagination, and so does she. And, much like I did when I was a kid, she sort of courts disaster. For example, she spends all day, every day playing “monsters” at school, so is it that much of a surprise that her mind turns to monsters when she is alone?

I also believe she, like any kid her age, is a master manipulator. There’s a fine line between not wanting to walk downstairs by herself and screaming, “I’m scared, I can’t take it anymore!” and trying to get out of her timeout, when she’s a couple of feet away from where I’m standing. I think she can detect that being afraid is something I am sensitive of, and she knows she can use it against me. It’s a hard one for me to ignore.

We’re not completely heartless. We don’t force her to do things, and we do try to be sensitive about this. One time Sara gave her the bottom piece of the fridge to use as a club for self-protection when she went to the bathroom. We let her sleep with her fake sword in her bed. And I even made a sign for her door (with her input of course) that says, “Don’t open this door, there’s giants in here!” (Monsters, of course, being afraid of giants, would run away and not open the door.) Even as we’re doing this, we always re-enforce that monsters don’t exist, and even if they did, we are safe in our own home. But so far, no amount of assurances on our part can make her feel better.

Any suggestions from you parents out there? Should we just ignore it until it goes away? Is she just doing this because she knows it’s my weakness?

Or is our house actually full of monsters that we adults have lost the ability to sense?