Natalie updates

I’ve been so focused on Andrew lately that I haven’t had a chance to update how Natalie is doing.

• loves singing songs from school, such as Days of the Week or the Stone Soup song
• is a total sponge and is really building up her vocabulary.  She surprises us often with things she says, like: “that’s not fair!”, “that would be lovely”, “Oh, I would love to..”, “are you kidding me?”
• usually eats cereal, oatmeal or “fig bars” (i.e. cereal bars) for breakfast
• loves deconstructing her sandwiches.  For example, with a PB+J, she’ll lick out the jam first, then the peanut butter, then eat the bread (leaving the crusts of course)
• still loves to walk on her tip toes…
• which is great for ballet, which she started a couple months ago
• loves to dress herself.  She normally can’t do that well as she still has a hard time taking shirts off — but this morning (Nov 12th for our records), she woke up, took her jammies off and completely dressed herself! (and the outfit was matching nonetheless) I was amazed!
• favorite tv shows are: Wonder Pets, anything Mickey, Kipper the Dog, Team Umizoomi, Kai-Lan, Color Crew, My Little Pony, Spiderman
• best friends at school are Daniel and Jack
• loves picking out the fall leaves
• imagination is growing — she loves bringing “all her friends” (i.e stuffed animals) and telling us stories about them, putting them to bed, organizing parties for them. She also loves to “make food” in her toy kitchen.
• is now brushing her teeth with an electronic toothbrush! I got her a Hello Kitty one and she loves it
• is an adrenaline junkie and has no problem going on tall slides or climbing tall structures.  She loves kiddie roller coasters and spinning “faster! faster!” at the playground.
• is still a night owl.  It’s hard getting her to sleep at night (if she’s asleep before 10pm, that’s a win for us) and will usually wake up between 8-9am but can easily go past 9am if she goes to bed late.
• bedtime is still a battle with her.  We don’t give her naps during the day so she can be as tired at night as possible.  I never thought I would intentionally remove naps–if you had told me that when she was 1, I would’ve thought that was crazy as I looooved naptime…but I love a stress-free evening more.
• super picky with food — refuses to eat anything that’s green or orange or even remotely looks like a vegetable.
• will sometimes come to our room and shove daddy aside so she can sleep in our bed
• is still very very social.  She LOVES saying hi to people.  Whenever we walk to and from school, she’ll say “HI!!!” to anyone she encounters and keep doing so until they say Hi! back to her
• loves giving kisses and hugs in saying goodbye to people.  As someone is leaving, she’ll usually go “wait!!  I didn’t give you a kiss and hug!”

I’ve seen some funny blog posts lately about how the age of 3 is worse than 2 (like this and this) and that definitely resonates with us.  At the age of 3, she’s more fiercely independent and defiant. She’s smarter and knows what she’s doing.  For example, sometimes she’ll play with her food at dinner and spill it onto the table — not good.  Sometimes in the process of getting her food with her fork, she accidentally spills it — okay, it’s just an accident.  So now, whenever she drops something or spills her milk, etc. she’ll look at us with batting eyes and says “but it was just an accident!!” [sigh]  It’s all really cool to see but it’s also quite the PITA sometimes!  For the most part, she’s growing into a wonderful, caring little girl..but she knows when she’s testing us! Oh boy.

Another weird thing that’s been happening to Natalie since the beginning of summer is her hair.  If you’ve seen her lately, she looks like she’s rockin’ an 80’s Joan Jett haircut (a nice female mullet)…but it’s not due to a bad trip to the kiddie hair salon.  Sometime beginning in May, her hair started to thin out, particularly around the crown and side of her head.  We have no idea why.  The good news is that the hair started to grow back so it’s not like she’s permanently losing hair.  But I swear, at the beginning of summer, she had all these short 1/2″ stubs of hair.  In speaking to her pediatrician, it’s likely she had a bizarre reaction to some illness in the late spring, resulting in her hair falling out.  It’s rare this happens but it can happen I guess.