(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 Our old one was out of date. I knew that, but I didn’t realize how far out of date.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.)