Him Is Laughing

Dear Lila,

Some random things about Lila, age almost-3-and-a-half:

-Every day I ask you how you want me to style your hair and every day you reply, "Anna braids."

-Speaking of hair, one of your biggest pet peeves is feeling stray hairs on your body. You get really upset if there's a stray hair, like, stuck to the bottom of your foot and insist that I remove it instead of doing it yourself--you don't want to touch it, even though, most of the time, it's your own hair. And you go ballistic in the bathtub when you can see a bunch of stray hairs stuck under the plastic mat. You refuse to stand on top of them, as if they'd burn your feet, even with the plastic mat in between you. And again, it's crazy how much you dislike them because it's usually your own hair!

-Your number one pet peeve, though? Getting your ears cleaned after you shower. Actually, it's much more than a pet peeve because you hate it so much and/or are so afraid of doing it that when Daddy and I tell you it's time to clean your ears, you clamp your hands over your ears, start screaming bloody murder and try to run away. It takes the both of us to do it, too, because one person has to pin you down while the other goes in with a Q-tip. You scream and thrash so much and cry so long and hard afterward that we only attempt to do it once a week, sometimes only once in two weeks. And that means that when we do actually manage to clean your ears, they are full of gross yellow/orange wax. Ew.

-By now, you can easily recognize and recite the entire alphabet and can count to 20. You are also learning about famous artists such as Andy Warhol in school, which is pretty cool.

-You have really come out of your shell during this school year. Before September, you never talked to anyone beside our family and your nanny. Now, you frequently talk to your friends and your friends' parents when we walk to the playground together after school and your teacher told me that you have recently started talking a lot in class. When I went to your class's Mother's Day Tea Party today, I saw that your talking is sometimes on a barely audible level--when you went up to Miss Kaitlin and asked where you could sit, you whispered it so quietly that she had to get down on her knee and practically put her ear on your mouth to hear you--but you are talking nonetheless!

-You are still the girly girl who loves pink and wearing dresses and skirts and twirling in them. You have Sofia the First and Anna costumes and you wear them frequently. You also love to pretend that you are Snow White or Rapunzel and that I am your "prinsh" (prince).

-The way you talk now is really cute, like when we were playing ice cream parlor and you asked me, "What flavor you like in your mouth?" Or when you couldn't pronounce Philadelphia and kept calling it "Fishedephia." Also, the pronoun "he" totally eludes you. Even though I correct you all of the time, you always say things like, "Him is laughing" and "Him don't like that." He! It's he!

Love,
Mom