minnie currently

1. her typical prayer right now consists of the following: please bless grandma and grandpa. please bless us to be safe. please bless us to have fun. please bless us to be safe (again). please help us to have a good nap. (she calls any time we sleep a nap). amen.

2. she has preferred wearing dresses for the past year or so but it has gotten to a pretty extreme level and I have kind of just given into it and bought her lots of dresses for the summer. she is typically wearing a crown, a necklace (both in most cases) some sort of princess dress or tutu. a girly girl, through and through.

3. she is super sassy and insanely independent right now (well, she's kind of always been) and I think I need to invest in some parenting books to get me through it. her sass and determination are also part of what make her so great.

4. I think she has an ongoing movie or play going on in her head 24 hours a day. randomly she'll just start talking to imaginary people (usually anna or elsa). robert keeps telling me he hopes she's not insane. I'm chalking it up to a great imagination.

5. she is absolutely terrified, and I mean terrified of bugs. Louie, on the other hand, will be the one to come over and smash them with her bare feet, which minnie loves. she and louie both have a bit of an irrational fear about dogs too. our friends, the gummersalls, have two pups that are so sweet but they get really excited when people first come over. I totally get that the dogs get all up in the girls faces, but even well after they've calmed down minnie will have a huge freak out if they get close to her, which naturally riles them up and then they're in her face again. we're working on it.

6. she has a major obsession with "baby jeremiah" her new cousin. whenever he is mentioned she perks right up and when we are with him she's always caressing his hair and touching his face (which he hates). she doesn't usually show too much interest in babies so I love how much she loves him. it makes me hopeful that when we have future babies she'll want to babysit. (one can always hope, right?)

7. she is a different princess each week and will correct me when I call her minnie. she'll say, "no, I'm so-and-so." the past few weeks it's been ariel, who she tells me is human now. louie is inevitably whatever prince goes with her particular persona. when she was belle a few months ago, lou was beast. now that she's ariel, lou is prince eric.

8. she tends to insert "so" into a lot of what she says. she just speaks in one gigantic run-on sentence.

9. she has always been really good at the stink eye, even in infanthood. but man, her faces have gotten even better during the last year.

10. hand-washing and toilet-flushing are a serious struggle around here. I'm just grateful she's really good at always making it to the potty. she seriously hasn't had an accident for about 9 months (knock on wood).

11. she can be sweetest thing in the world (caressing my face and telling me how beautiful I am) and then two seconds later she's totally crazy. all in the day of a three-year-old. (exhibit a below)

12. since minnie could talk, robert will make inanimate objects talk to her like stuffed animals or little toys, and it is by far one of her favorite things. she always asks us to make her toys talk. I am the worst at playing pretend like that but robert is amazing and will do it for hours on end. within the last year we were a little concerned she truly believed her animals and toys were real. the way she talks back to them...you would too. if robert used her favorite elephant and had him "tell" her things to do like go to bed or brush her teeth, she'd do it without hesitation, whereas if we just asked her she'd put up a fight. thus you can see our fear that she actually believed they were real. the other night minnie was putting up a huge fuss about going to bed so robert told her if she didn't climb into bed and calm down he was going to take her elephant away. minnie, being her usual three-year-old self, did not calm down or climb into bed so robert followed through and took elephant away. he closed her door and two seconds later she swung it open and came barreling down the hall to find elephant and to say she would make better choices. robert told her that her elephant was sad that she wouldn't listen so he had to be taken away so he decided to run away. minnie's eyes welled up with big alligator tears and then she said, "he can't run! he's not real!" robert and I about died! and it kind of put us at ease to know she actually knew it was all pretend.

13. she's super interested in the "bad queens" in movies right now, like ursula and Isma from the emperor's new grove. I think it's mostly because she's scared of them and feels like she needs to figure them out or something.

14. lou can say quite a bit these days, but often she'll just jabber and you can't really make out a single thing she says. when minnie and lou are playing minnie will try to decipher what lou's saying and and then ask, "is that what you said lou?' louie will pretty much always say "yeah" and then they'll go on their merry way. it's kind of nice because minnie can put whatever words she wants into lou's mouth and they'll play happily for quite awhile.

15. I love how inquisitive and perceptive minnie is right now. she can spot a place we've been to once and as we drive by she'll say, "we went there for dinner the other night." the other day we were headed down to st. george and we passed ikea. minnie perked up and said, "hey, that's the store that we like!" apparently we've been to ikea a few too many times since buying our new house. she also makes connections so easily, connections I didn't even see myself. she finds letters in sticks and shapes in random objects. I just feel like she grasps lots of concepts really easily and it's so fun to see her put it all together. because she picks up on things so easily, I'm considering putting her in a chinese immersion program when she starts kindergarten. some people love it, so people hate it. I think she would do well, but we shall see.

16. I love how much minnie talks about Jesus. yesterday, when she was being a little nutty, I was giving her a hug to try and calm her down a bit (and me too) and she pulled back and said, "Jesus doesn't like it when I make bad choices. He wants me to make good choices." she can be rough sometimes, but at her core she is very sensitive, especially to others feelings. sometimes it takes her a minute to realize why someone is sad or why she's hurting someone's feelings, but when she does she wants to make it right. I love her so much and can't believe how much she's changed in the last year. she makes our lives so sweet and fills our home with energy and love. I can't wait to see what this next year with her brings.