Evie Update

Eeeevie has a boooyfriend

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When Evie started daycare, there were all sorts of people there. However, over time, they have gone off to school, moved away, etc. So these days, it is a few babies, Evie, and her best buddy L. (His name has been changed, obviously, to protect the non-consenting innocent)

So they spend a lot of time together, and I didn’t think much of all the “L. said this” and “Me and L. did that” stories. Evie and L. spend a lot of time making plans, so naturally they planned a day together. Naturally, the first thing they would do is pick flowers together in a field, after which they would take a bath together and then go to sleep together.

Finally we got around to inviting L. over to our house, and Evie was looking forward to his visit for weeks. The big day arrived, and the first thing Evie said to me in the morning was, “Today L. is coming! Can you tell my heart is racing? Can you see how happy I am?” When she went down to pick up her clothes she said, “I have to pick out clothes that L. would like!”

It couldn’t have been any more date-like. The funny thing is, when he got here, Evie spent most of the time playing with his older sister. (Although she was pretty disappointed that he wasn’t spending the night.)

I know that anybody who has kids this age sees this kind of behavior, but it was pretty funny. Obviously it isn’t really romantic love, just friendship through the eyes of two 3 year olds. We made a point to not make a fuss about it. We certainly don’t need another little girl with big girl ideas put into her head by adults. So leave her alone about it…don’t you remember when you were a kid and you got teased about something like this?

No, I’ll apply all my teasing retroactively, when she’s a teenager and she finds this blog post.

Quick Hits

/ Shane / Leave a comment
  • These days, Evie insists on have tights sticking out of her drawer with her drawer closed, so it looks like legs sticking out. Those legs represent the Wicked Witch of the West.*
  • Nothing makes me feel less manly than having the alarm go off in the night. I guess I should feel the opposite, like big strong protector of the household, but really I’m just reluctantly jabbing a stick into dark rooms to startle anybody in there, ready to run at the first sign of trouble.
  • Although Oliver can’t walk yet, we discovered he can open the front and back doors. We have lever handles, and it turns out those handles are just a little lower than the rest of the doors in the house, so he can reach and pull if he really tries.
  • Babies are generally very good at getting you what you want, but a baby with sunglasses on is irresistible. I forgot about this since Evie was a baby, but it never fails. It’s like the atomic bomb of cuteness.

* EDIT: It has been pointed out that the legs would more correctly represent the Wicked Witch of the East, which is true. But come on guys, she’s three!

I HAVE THE POWER

/ Shane / Leave a comment

By the power of Greyskull...

In other look-alike news, my brother-in-law pointed out another eerie similarity…

The Opposite of Sleepwalking

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Since the moment Evie was born, we have struggled to get her to sleep. This has been a long term, large scale war, not a single battle. Sometimes we’ll do something to get the upper hand, but something else always eventually comes up, putting us back to square one. Currently we are in the middle of just such an uprising. After a long lull, Evie has been getting up multiple times per night, either to get a drink of water, or to go to the bathroom.

This is usually just after she goes to bed or right before she is supposed to get up. She gets lonely and wants a little human contact, and she has realized that saying she has a potty emergency is an irrefutable excuse to get up. The problem is that Evie’s middle name is “you-give-me-an-inch-I’ll-take-a-mile”. After letting her go to the potty for a few days, it started to be more and more frequent, and earlier and earlier in the morning. So she would start waking up at 5, going potty, and then staying up singing at the top of her lungs until it is time to get up. I was starting to go crazy.

We re-instituted the potty tickets, which worked for a second or so, but then she quickly went back to her old ways. She would use the potty ticket the first time she wanted to get up (usually 10 seconds after going to bed), but then she would get up later saying she had to go again. The problem is, how do you not let her go to the potty? She always goes when you take her to the potty. She really does have to go. The only quibble is how bad she actually has to go. This is a nuance that cannot be explained to a 3 year old. “But daddy, I went pee pee and poo poo!” To her, that’s the end of it; she said she had to go, and she did. And quite frankly, if she says she has to go and then she does in fact go, who am I to say whether it was an emergency or not?

We even tried bribing her. For every night that she doesn’t use her potty ticket, she can have a dime towards her book orders (the big reward du jour). “I’ll get it tomorrow,” she says, handing me her ticket. If she could at least go by herself, she would lose interest in it, but she won’t go by herself. And it’s a little hard to avoid her when she comes in to go while I’m taking a shower in the morning.

The thing is, I know she doesn’t really need to go. Until recently she went all night, no problem, and didn’t even have to go first thing in the morning. So how do I let her go when she has to go, but somehow not “reward” her by giving her attention, to the point where she drops this and moves on?

The only other idea we have is to get out her old potty and leave it in her room, so she can go if she needs to, but doesn’t get to wake everybody up, etc. Maybe we’ll give that a try.

Should I be worried about this?

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Evie spent almost two hours yesterday making up a story about the Little Mermaid. This is pretty standard around here. The problem is, this story entirely centered around patricide.

The main part of the story involved Ariel first stuffing Triton in a hole, then tearing him apart with her bare hands, then putting the pieces into a gun and shooting them, and then collecting the pieces, cooking them, and serving them to her sisters. Not satisfied with this, Ariel proceeds to go on a psychopathic rampage, applying for new daddies and killing and eating them one by one. Finally, Ariel decides to keep one of the new fathers, and is forced to calm her bloodthirsty sisters who are clamoring for his death (and his flesh).

Of course I summarized it into a paragraph, but her rendition involved great detail and storytelling craft. The daddies weren’t just “cooked”. There were recipes (One daddy was served with pumpkin pancakes, a daddy recipe to be sure. Oh the irony!). There were discussions with the chef. There were details, like which sister helped Ariel lift the pot. There were descriptions of the sound it made as Triton “sizzled” in the pan.

I didn’t try to dissuade her from talking about these things. I’m not worried about it in the sense that I know all kids go through phases like this, and it’s not personal. Still, after hours of hearing the gory details of how and why Ariel killed her daddy (“he was mean and he did mean things to Ariel”), and given the fact that she makes me pretend to be Triton pretty much every day, I couldn’t help but take it a little personally. The story was pretty specific and very…thorough.

I think I’ll be sleeping with one eye open from now on.