Owlet is FOUR!

Okay, the biggest thing this past month was the glasses, coming in right under the wire three days before her birthday.

She got her first bike for her birthday! It’s a stride/balance bike. We probably could have gotten her one with pedals, but the weight of those plus learning how to pedal, plus the not-such-a-success of that with Sparky… well, when I found this balance bike at a super awesome price, we chose this route.

This past month she also decided to start using my fountain pens! Proud mum, right here.

We’ve been dropping Sparky off at camp every day, and Owlet is very taken with one of the teachers who staffs the sign in/out desk. This woman happens to be Sparky’s piano teacher, so we are very interested in piano all of a sudden. She’s taken to asking to watch videos on YouTube of little kids doing their Suzuki book 1 recitals, mostly piano and violin, but she sometimes asks to watch cellists, too. I inquired (iron, hot, etc) and the teacher said they like to start them around age 5, around the time they’re learning to read, although it depends on the child; she had a 4 1/2-year-old who had just started, for example. But she told me about an intro to music course the arts centre runs for three- to six-year-olds, which covers rhythm and movement, and every week they learn about a different symphonic instrument. (This is convenient for them to do because the arts centre teaches all kind of music lessons with various instrumentalists.) So we’ll hit the open house the weekend after Labour Day and check it out. They start violinists as early as three years old, though, so if Owlet is utterly taken with that at the open house… well, we’ll have to see. I think the intro course is the best bet for now.

Owlet is super into crafts these days. Her drawing has improved and focused, and her scribbles are resolving into recognizable things. She drew me next to a present for my birthday, and there’s even a multi-layered cake up top:

(What is everything else? Who knows. Fireworks?)

She also uses her art to charmingly inflict guilt for no apparent reason. “See? This is me. I’m crying. I’m crying because you made me so, so sad. Those are tears on my face. In the rain.”

She had the last two weeks of July off daycare, and there were many trips to Michael’s for craft kits and art supplies. I still find it mildly amazing that I can set her up at the table on her own, and she can glue things to other things and cut stuff up with her plastic scissors. Like this dragon. It may look like a warped Tonka truck to you, and indeed that’s what it was intended to be. Part of her ‘happy vacation’ goodie bag from school, it started out as a huge sheet of card stock with punchout pieces that you fold and slot together to make a 3D truck. She sat down with her little plastic pinking shears at the kitchen table and cut it all up, then used a glue stick to put pieces together to make a dragon.

As of her annual checkup, she is 17.1 kg (that’s 37.7 pounds) and exactly 100 cm tall (one meter, yay!). She’s wearing between size 8 and 9 shoes, depending on the style, and size 4 or 5 clothes. (Except the 18-24 month leggings she wears under her dresses; they’re like knee-length playground shorts, and I never thought she’d fit into them again, but she has stretched out and slimmed down so much that they have a second life.)

She’s in a weird limbo between needing a nap (or else she’s whiny at 5 pm) and needing to not take a nap so she’ll actually fall asleep before 9 pm. Bedtime has become a challenge, with several calls for water, a trip to the bathroom, someone to rub her back, and general whining. She doesn’t nap at all at home; we’re looking forward to the preschool nap being phased out and evolved into quiet time instead. Then she’ll go to sleep on time at home on school days.

Three years old! Impossible!

Our Owlet has lost most of her baby chub. Now she just has that toddler tummy. She’s wearing size 8 shoes (sometimes 9, and winter boots seem to be 10) and size 4 everything else. Although now we are at a point where the waists of things don’t snug properly if they’re styled with a button or zipped; elastic waists are our friends again. She is 34 pounds/14.5 kilos, and about a metre tall. We have to comb her hair every night before bed and when she gets up in the morning, and rub a dab of conditioner between our hands and smooth it through to help avoid tangles. When it’s wet and the curls vanish, her hair reaches her mid back, which always manages to surprise me, even though I of all people know that the length of curly hair is always deceptive.

She loves listening to The Doubleclicks, and she is currently obsessed with the film How to Train Your Dragon. The Henry and Mudge series of books is the best thing ever right now, particularly The Forever Sea, the Funny Lunch, Annie’s Perfect Pet, and The Happy Cat. She can ‘read’ the first few pages of The Funny Lunch, as well as some of her board books like Goodnight Moon and Mouse Count. Lately she’s been settling down and telling herself stories from books, reconstructing a semblance of the plot and dialogue from the pictures, adding in snippets of perfectly remembered phrases. When she gets to the end, she closes the book and announces gleefully, “I did it!”

She has begun making her toys have long, involved conversations with different voices. This is wonderful and we love it, but it also happens after she has been put to bed, and there are times were we have to step in and tell her bunnies to shush because they are being too loud and rambunctious, and they are keeping Owlet awake with their antics. She has begun a funny bedtime thing after lights out of sorting through the dolls and animals who sit at the end of her bed and knocking on the door, then handing various ones to whoever comes to the door. One night the white lamb may be sent to sleep with me, HRH is directed to sleep with the brown rabbit, and the white rabbit may be sent to Sparky. As adorable as it is, it takes up time and focus that are supposed to be for sleeping, so I think we’ll have to move those toys at bedtime.

Her use of language has leveled up yet again — a few times in the past month, actually. We’ve had some crazy leaps recently. One set of words she’s been working hard to master is brother/sister, restating the relationship from different points of view to see if it still makes sense.

She is a wonderful eater, bless her. She’s still off potatoes unless they are in fry shape, and avocados are still yucky, but just about everything else you put on her plate will be eaten cheerfully. She devoured two ribs at Nana and Grandad’s house when we were there, also had her first taste of Camembert and promptly ate a third of the wheel of cheese, had her first taste of almonds, and would have eaten the whole bag if it had been on the table. Nana also gave her a miniature Hagen Daaz ice cream bar, and that was definitely a bit of all right, thank you. If we let her, she’d eat her way through our cherry tomato plants, and we have discovered she adores cucumber again all of a sudden… but it can’t be sliced into rounds or peeled. We have to cut a garden cuke in half, then hand it to her to eat like an ice cream cone. Unfortunately, we planted the wrong kind of peas in the garden this year; the pods are too fibrous to eat, so we have to carefully open each one and scoop out the peas inside for a treat. (Or we did, for what few managed to grow. We’ve already pulled the vines out, they were growing so poorly.)

I was informed several times in July that her birthday was coming, and “I will have three years old!” She has also informed me that she would have little bugs on her cake. I don’t know if that’s because she had ladybugs and bees on her cupcakes last year and thinks that all her birthday cakes will be decorated with bugs, or because she just adores bugs and wants them again. Either way, we had a bug theme again, to her delight. She had an early birthday celebration at Nana and Grandad’s house, because they weren’t be able to come down for her actual birthday party, and since she informed Nana that there would be bugs on her cake, I popped over to Michael’s to see if they had anything we could use as cake decorations. There was nothing specific, so I improvised by buying red candy melts and sparkly black decorating gel. It was so successful that I did it again for her birthday here.

She had her first beach experience while at Nana and Grandad’s, too. We found a tiny sandy area along the boardwalk, and after being unsure about the sand in her sandals, then unsure about the sand under her feet, then about going close to the water, then about letting the water touch her toes, she decided everything was okay. So okay that there were big heaving sobs when we had to leave and go home for lunch, and she got stuck in a crying loop and couldn’t break out of it for about twenty minutes.

She is so past the smaller wading pool. This weekend she asked if she could go in Sparky’s big pool, and we said yes. She’s fine with it, so the tiny wading pool has now been retired. They love playing in it together. In fact, Sparky was trying to give her swimming lessons and giving her rides on his back today.

She’s a marvellous little girl, so fun and sharp, sweet and silly, joyous and clever. She’s testing her boundaries in a very three-year-old way, needing to be told something over and over if she doesn’t like the answer, but also making wonderful intuitive or deductive leaps. We love having her around. We think she’s okay with us, too.