The here and now

At long last the Kid really reads. She didn't feel confident she could read well enough up until just lately when it clicked that she could do it. I could pretend that I have no idea where she gets the "it must be perfect or I won't even start, it's too hard if it takes more than 2 tries, fear of failure paralyzed me" mentality, but clearly it's her parents modeling that in some behavior or other. It sure isn't in what we tell her or how we praise her efforts (and she often points this out and uses great effort as a reason why something must be kept FOREVER) so we adults need to look over ourselves and root out the perfectionism. Her favorite books are Wayside School gets a little stranger and Calvin and Hobbes. She got really into a patent law discussion recently when we tried to explain it after a strip where calvin's dad starts telling him the story of the Extra Awesome Tool Patent or some such. 2nd grade. Whoa. I mostly kick myself for not having taken a job that meant we could have stayed put because this school is so inferior to her previous one. She may learn something this year but it's hard to say. We do multiplication at home, they do single digit addition to equal something under 20 in school. Her outfits tend toward bright and with patterns regardless of whether the patterns match each other. Unicorn socks are much sought after but we just have the one pair, 3 sizes too big because I guessed wrong at the store.

Little Monster is going through the most terrible part of being two. She has strong opinions about everything, including that the only song in Just Dance that can be played is Istanbul (not Constantinople) by They Might Be Giants and that the color of her controller's light change at least twice a song. Screaming and tantrums occur every few minutes because she is so MAD. Naps are mostly gone but sometimes that means a sane bedtime near 8pm so that's all right. She loves her purple "fizbee" and her toy bulldog and white rat. The rat looks real enough that I often start and think a dead rat snuck into my bed or onto the driveway before I look again and see its fluff and tag remnants. She keeps changing her identity from Donnie (fav ninja reptile) to Little Monster, Esquire (her full name with all its syllables, no nicknames or omissions) and then to Princess Something (Sofia, Elsa, McStuffins, Mer-da, Anna, Baymax, etc.). She must be going through a gross motor growth or development spurt because she crashes and leaps to her crashing scraped-up sadness often. Last week she was being raced down the block in the stroller by the Kid and she got tipped forward onto her face. I think a front tooth moved in addition to a tiny chip but it didn't bother her too much so we let her be. The girls now can only go 2 houses from home and never across the street for LM and absolutely no stroller. Today she first refused bandages for her dripping blood scrapes, then demanded them, then cried and hid when we tried to put them on her at all, with hitting and writhing when the bandage got within 6 inches of a scrape. Most nights she sleeps on our floor and still has the accursed baby plug (aka pacifier) and someday that will change but not yet. I can't bring myself to make her give up that last baby vestige.