We have pictures, so let’s do the 40 month post anyway, yes? This will be backdated to 4 December 2014 in a few days.

There was an overnight language upgrade again. There’s subtlety, updated syntax, that sort of thing. And pronunciation has become even clearer, not that we’ve had trouble understanding her for a while now. She can count to twenty without hesitation (fifteen is sneaky and sometimes get dropped; Sparky had a similar issue with fourteen and sixteen, which is interesting).

Her expression in art has leveled up, too. Her paintings are often still chaotic, but she painted a picture of flowers that were very recognisable this month. Her use of colour has really exploded, too. Rather than just making one or two marks on a page and calling it done, now she’s filling the entire paper with rich colour and lots of motion. Painting is her number one activity; if she can’t paint, she’ll colour or do something with stickers. I bought some poster paint, cleaned out the unit that housed the ColorWonder gel paints that all dried out, and mixed the poster paint to go in each little pot. She likes it much more than watercolors, which can be slow to get started, and it’s much easier to pull out her little art desk, pop open the paint jars, and let her go.

She loves just about any craft activity, though; if there are stickers and glue, she’s excited.

When she needs a pencil sharpened she says, “Can you scrape this please?” And her pencil grip has miraculously improved. I saw her approximating a correct pencil grip the other day for the first time. Apparently she’d seen her godsister coloring at my last concert, stared at her hand for a bit, then shifted her fingers around her own marker so it was like hers. It was encouraging.

(THose were taken on different days; she just really loves that shirt.)

We gave her a couple of quarters to put in her bank one day when we gave Sparky his allowance, and suddenly she was very interested in it. “Can I have a money?” she says. “My owl is hungry.” So we dig a nickel or a dime out of our change pockets, and off she goes to ‘feed’ her owl bank.

She has decided that when she is big and has her ears pierced, she would like feather earrings. Also ladybug ones, and rainbows. She must have heard about pierced ears at school for some reason; I rarely change my earrings from my small, plain hoops, and I don’t talk about them.

At the end of November they started working on a winter unit at school, and she brought home this little diorama:

There’s a bonus view of her wonky jack o’lantern jar next to it. It had an LED tea light in it that burned out pretty quickly because she insisted on having it on all night, every night.

She’s fun. They’ve started with the Christmas songs at school, so now there’s a lot of Frosty the Snowman and Jingle Bells happening in the car. She still gets stuck in those funny little-kid loops when singing, where they slip into a line from an earlier verse and then sing the chorus and end up slipping on the same line again. We grin and bear it, myself with more patience than Sparky. He refuses to hear that he did it, too, because he could never be so uncool.

~ Sparky’s forty-months post, for comparison

(Look, I managed to upload photos and paste in the coding, so you can have the November Owlet post! I’ll backdate it to 4 November 2014 in a couple of days.)

There’s more Being Three going on. Naps are becoming an Issue, for example. Owlet will not nap if I put her down. She naps at school, she naps if her dad puts her down… but she refuses to do it for me. I’ve come to the point where Wednesdays I have to assume I will get nothing done, because I will spend almost two hours going into her room to get her back into bed. And if she finally falls asleep it’s around 2:45, an hour and a half after nap is supposed to begin, and I have to wake her up at 3:30 to go get Liam from school, and she cries the whole way because guess what, she didn’t have a proper nap. And no, she’s not ready to give up her nap; she still naps a long time at preschool and on weekends. She still very definitely needs her naps. She’s just being frustratingly stubborn.

We get errands done together on Wednesday mornings. One such day we went and bought her a new car seat. Our old one was out of date. I knew that, but I didn’t realize how far out of date. (Eek.) Owlet weighs 35 pounds, and that was the limit for the old one. This one can be used till she’s something like 110 pounds and 1.45 metres tall! (As a booster, obviously, not the 5-point.) Still… at least now we’re good until she’s, what, twelve?

A conversation about pre-writing skills came up in my mums group (mostly experienced mothers assuring newer ones that three wasn’t an age to be worried about lack of correct writing grip). Owlet still holds her crayons in a fist. It doesn’t help that I actually don’t hold a pencil properly, either, so I’m a lousy model. We still can’t trust her with markers (she scribbled all over the piano keys with permanent black marker recently; that was fun), not even washable ones, because when my kids get hold of so-called washable markers, they stain and do not, in fact, wash out. I discovered her scissor skills were pretty good the other day, though; Grandma found some Crayola scissors that are plastic but very sharp, which cut straight, wavy, or zigzag lines. We love them. You need to hold the paper pretty taut, though.

HRH turned the enormous box that held her carseat into a playhouse. The kids coloured it, and she moved some pillows and blankets inside and had a blast for weeks.

HRH also brought home some interlocking foam squares a student had left behind after a project, so I could use them for blocking knitted things, but Owlet has taken possession of them and lays them out to use as a bed for either herself or her toys. Sparky and HRH showed her that she could build three-dimensional objects with them, too.

She was very excited when I started knitting her mittens. I used her pink handspun for the cuffs, and some bulky black for the hands. Her educator thinks they’re terrific and that I am brilliant, because Owlet likes to mess around in the ground with leaves and sticks, and black doesn’t show dirt. (No pictures, of course. Or rather, there is a picture, but it’s ridiculously blurred.)

Halloween was fun for her. I documented her Halloween costume here. She has been having one piece of candy from her stash after supper each day. She gets so excited about how good it is that she wants to share it. She holds it out to me, saying, “Taste it, it’s good! Open your mouth and take a bite, like this.” I try to take tiny nibbles to leave her most of it, but she keeps telling me to take bigger bites. (And to chew. That’s because we have to remind her to chew bites of supper, and to swallow, as well, if it’s something she doesn’t really want to eat, like meat.)

Fall was, overall, lots of fun. But it’s all fun when you’re three. (Except when it’s not. And when it’s not… it’s really not.)

Owlet has decided that all dresses and long skirts are called ‘ballets.’ “I like your ballet!” she says to anyone in a dress. “Noooo, I want to wear my butterfly ballet!” she says when we offer her any of her dresses. (The butterfly ballet is actually this dress with flowers on it. Preschooler language; you learn it or you die.)

Her favourite books are Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and William Mayne’s The Patchwork Cat. Her favourite movie is now Despicable Me 2, or “minions” in preschooler-speak.

She has just begun her four days a week at preschool, after a month off. For the past couple of weeks she’s been having two play dates there per week, arriving after snack and playing till lunch, participating in circle time and some games. There was water play on the really nice days. It got to a point where the kids would see us through the windows as we were walking up, and start shouting that “Bee” was here, with great excitement. (Apparently that nickname arises spontaneously elsewhere, which is amusing because it’s one of our little nicknames for her within the family, too.) The play date time was open to all the kids and mums who were going to be merging into the big daycare, but Owlet was the only one who made it to all four. (The educator tells me that Owlet had the least trouble merging into the routine in the first week, and credits her attendance at the play dates for it.) I sat with whatever mum had come with her kid that day and watched everyone play. It was hard but interesting to watch her be shy, to try to fit herself into the games being played by children who’d known each other for a year or more, or who knew her but knew their immediate playmates better. It’s a new dynamic; she has to figure out how she fits in, and then the group dynamic has to resettle as well.

We got her a new My Little Pony backpack, and there was a little coil-bound coloring kit we got at the same time, which she calls her “schedule.” She wore the backpack out of the store very proudly, and as soon as she got out of the car at home she sat down on the driveway and opened it to find “my schedule, Mummy, I have to check my schedule.”

Chalk is her newest big obsession. We picked up some packs of big, soft play chalk one day in August, and we didn’t even get inside the house before both kids wanted to tear open the packaging and start drawing on the driveway. Owlet is very into drawing legs on things that I draw for her, long spindly legs that sometimes aren’t attached to the body of whatever owns them. Or even attached to things that usually don’t have them, like apples.

I had the brilliant idea of bringing the easel up from downstairs and setting it up in the enclosed side porch right next to the kitchen so she’d have an art station up here instead of having to set something up on the kitchen table every time. I bought a new roll of art paper, too, so now when she wants to draw or paint, she can sit right there and do it. It should be good through the winter; HRH just has a bit more weatherizing to do to prevent the occasional snow drift, and the plank floor will be covered with foam squares to cut the cold air from seeping up as well.

On that chalkboard she drew the first thing that actually really looks like what she said it was. “Look, I drawed a fish!” she said, and yes, she really did. The eyes and the head are in the upper left, and it swoops around and down, with the tail at the bottom centre:

(We don’t know exactly why there is an unhappy face inside the fish. That part of the narrative was not shared with us. But we can make some pretty informed guesses.)

Other new things include Popsicles, tacos (we never thought those would fly, but we are so very wrong), learning to rinse and spit with her new toothpaste, having her fingernails painted with polish for the first time, and discovering Wonder Woman thanks to Ceri, Scott, and Ada gifting her with a Wonder Woman-themed birthday present.

Recently she’s really gotten into developing and telling stories, constructing little narratives. Most recently there have been things like, “It’s so dark. It is night? Where are the spirits? Some are sleeping, and some go to the bathhouse. There is a spirit who wanted to go to the bathhouse but didn’t know how to get there, so he jumped, like a rabbit, and he turned into a rabbit, and hop hop hopped to the bathhouse.” (That’s a blend of Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away and her own little story about a spirit.)

The other odd thing is her insistence that everything is named “Dead.” At first we thought she was mangling the pronunciation of Jed, or Deb, or Jen… but no. “I see a dog! It’s name is Dead.” It’s mildly disturbing if we think about it too long and try to read too much into it, but it’s just a word to her. She’s too busy to take into account her parent’s weird hangups. There’s dancing to do.