Update-y Post
I haven't done one of these in a loooooong time. But I think I'll start an update now. Daisy is almost four! She will be four next month. Unbelievable. Here are some things she is doing and things about her.
--Daisy counted 100 beads yesterday! She counted accurately and said all the numbers perfectly until she got to eighty-nine. She needed help coming up with the word "ninety" and then counted perfectly again to ninety-nine, at which point I had to prompt her with the word "one hundred." Not too shabby. She is also pretty reliable at pointing out odd and even numbers and explaining why.
--Daisy is very interested in justice these days. She has been telling us that things are "not fair." So far this has not led to any big problems, just discussions of the concept of justice. This child is very, VERY cerebral. It's a little frightening sometimes. She is also now fascinated by the concept of "bad" words and constantly asks us whether this word or that word is "bad." Sometimes these words are made up, and other times so clearly not bad words that I have no idea where she's getting the idea (for example, she wanted to know if "drainpipes" and "sewer pipes" were bad word). She also corrects me and Mark constantly now if a word slips out that shouldn't, or even if she remotely suspects that we might have said one, and she is a harsh taskmistress. She insisted the other day that I had used a bad word, but she refused to tell me what it was because that would mean SHE would have to say it. I finally convinced her to tell me what it was, and she said with great mortification that it had been "ass." I am pretty sure I had not said "ass," so I think it must have been a syllable in another word I was using. But her mortification over having to use a "bad" word was amusing. We made an agreement that she can say these words if, as she puts it, she is "saying them for good, not bad."
--She talks more than anybody in the whole wide world. Seriously. With any activity she's doing, be it gymnastics, dance, or music class, she is the child saying, "Excuse me! Excuse me, teacher! I just noticed that..." And it goes on. Today she interrupted Seth, our beloved music teacher, during his farewell song to inform him that he had said goodbye to Dylan twice.
--She is so mentally alert and sharp. She memorizes her books still and can correct my reading of them on a minute level--say, I've forgotten an article (like "a" or "the") or I say something in the singular when it should be in the plural. Sometimes when I'm reading to hear at night and I'm tired, and she's selected a book with a lot of text, I'll try to trim some of the text down to make the book go faster--skipping a line or two. Ohhhhhh no. She almost always calls me on it and informs me of the line I've neglected to say. She is also an uncannily clear speaker with very precise pronunciation, a huge vocabulary, and a wide variety of sentence structures at her disposal. Embarrassingly, she has taken to asking me whether various children have "accents," and when I inform her no, they do not, she says, "Then why do they talk like that?" It is embarrassing, as I am well aware that she is the oddity, not them.
--Yesterday Daisy had a big "jealous" moment. It was when Mark was playing the guitar at a party. Daisy embarrassed me by stating loudly and clearly that she did not want him to play, and then asking after every song whether that would be the last one. I pulled her aside and she explained to me, "I am jealous, Mama." The reason was that she wanted her father to pay attention to her and talk to her, rather than perform for the party. I convinced her to sit with me and watch, though she continued to tell me periodically, "I am jealous." It is not a pleasant trait, but I know it's a human one and one that children are bound to feel, so I didn't think I should squash her brutally. But we need to work on this somehow. She is definitely grappling with her dark side and brings it up for conversation fairly frequently.
--Another incident occurred at ballet class on Saturday. Daisy was waiting her turn to do something, and I'm sure as she sits there she is thinking (the neat thing is that now she's old enough to share with us trains of thought, or things she was imagining, etc.). I saw a pissed-off look cross her face, and she even put her hands on her hips and made a little defiant face. Then she stood up and said in front of the whole ballet class, to my mortification, "Mama, when I'm having a playdate I want you only to pay attention to me!" I don't know which playdate she was recalling, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with ballet class and just happened to be something she was brooding on. I can tell she knows she is having an emotion that is considered less than admirable because she always gets a dark, sort of guilty look on her face, coupled with defiance, when she decides to declare one of these feelings to me. It is these times when I feel unlucky to have an articulate child. I am pretty sure other children must be having these unattractive emotions too, but instead of screaming or crying or having a tantrum, mine has to state loudly and with perfect clarity exactly which unattractive emotion she is experiencing, for the whole world to hear.
--Yeah, so... she is grappling with these less than wonderful emotions, which I know we all have and deny to varying degrees. But at the same time, she is so sweet and affectionate and wonderful. The great majority of the time, she is full of joie de vivre. She runs and skips and laughs and dances around, and sings! And she has great love for her friends. She is more and more social all the time. I felt we had crossed an important line when she told me recently that it was fine that I would be there (at her swimming lesson), but what friends her own age would be there? In the past, as long as I was going to be with her, she'd be fine, or she'd see me as the ideal playmate. Now, I'm hearing more and more from her that she would like to play with kids her own age.
--She has made great strides physically lately. She is still very delayed, by a year or more, in the gross motor skills department. That means I'm comparing her gains to where she was before, not to other kids her own age. She did a somersault for the first time recently after having been taught by a teacher at her Little Gym class, Jazzy Bugs. This is a new thing--she had asked me to take "tap and jazz" lessons, and a friend recommended the Little Gym's program. Daisy is loving it. They do half an hour of dancing--tap and ballet--and then half an hour in the gym. To my surprise, the gym part is Daisy's favorite. It gladdens my heart to see the way she runs off without me, getting comfortable almost immediately with new adults and new kids. And even though she doesn't have the same level of skills as kids her age, she is trying everything and continually pushing past her own limits-- jumping from high places, somersaulting, and the other day she tried walking on hands and feet along two parallel bars. She surprises me all the time, trying things I would have predicted she would refuse to try. She now bolts up the stairs using one foot per stair, when for years she had to walk slowly and put both feet on every stair. She is just blossoming!
--I think 3.5-4 has been a golden time. She's still fun and silly and has some little kid qualities, but more and more she is my big kid who can converse with me about a lot of things and is increasingly inhabiting the social world. I think I will miss the little kid silliness and lack of inhibition and it will be sort of sad to see her growing all self-conscious, but I know that's also part of becoming a member of society-- becoming aware of the impression you make on other people, of their thoughts and perspectives, etc.
--She is pretty easy. Almost everything can be discussed now. A tantrum/truly degraded moment is a great rarity. She is a skilled procrastinator, but that mostly affects her doting grandma, not her parents. She even agrees to stay in bed till 7 now, although she has the annoying tendency to ask every minute (starting from 6:45 or so, when she's awake then), "Is it 7 now?" I really have to teach her to read her clock. (Well--she can read it, but she doesn't know the math to understand how many more minutes are entailed until 7.) Most of the time, it feels like I am living with a pretty reasonable person who can be counted on to do her part in getting us through the day. Again, I will miss the baby Daisy, but this is a pretty good time.
--Daisy counted 100 beads yesterday! She counted accurately and said all the numbers perfectly until she got to eighty-nine. She needed help coming up with the word "ninety" and then counted perfectly again to ninety-nine, at which point I had to prompt her with the word "one hundred." Not too shabby. She is also pretty reliable at pointing out odd and even numbers and explaining why.
--Daisy is very interested in justice these days. She has been telling us that things are "not fair." So far this has not led to any big problems, just discussions of the concept of justice. This child is very, VERY cerebral. It's a little frightening sometimes. She is also now fascinated by the concept of "bad" words and constantly asks us whether this word or that word is "bad." Sometimes these words are made up, and other times so clearly not bad words that I have no idea where she's getting the idea (for example, she wanted to know if "drainpipes" and "sewer pipes" were bad word). She also corrects me and Mark constantly now if a word slips out that shouldn't, or even if she remotely suspects that we might have said one, and she is a harsh taskmistress. She insisted the other day that I had used a bad word, but she refused to tell me what it was because that would mean SHE would have to say it. I finally convinced her to tell me what it was, and she said with great mortification that it had been "ass." I am pretty sure I had not said "ass," so I think it must have been a syllable in another word I was using. But her mortification over having to use a "bad" word was amusing. We made an agreement that she can say these words if, as she puts it, she is "saying them for good, not bad."
--She talks more than anybody in the whole wide world. Seriously. With any activity she's doing, be it gymnastics, dance, or music class, she is the child saying, "Excuse me! Excuse me, teacher! I just noticed that..." And it goes on. Today she interrupted Seth, our beloved music teacher, during his farewell song to inform him that he had said goodbye to Dylan twice.
--She is so mentally alert and sharp. She memorizes her books still and can correct my reading of them on a minute level--say, I've forgotten an article (like "a" or "the") or I say something in the singular when it should be in the plural. Sometimes when I'm reading to hear at night and I'm tired, and she's selected a book with a lot of text, I'll try to trim some of the text down to make the book go faster--skipping a line or two. Ohhhhhh no. She almost always calls me on it and informs me of the line I've neglected to say. She is also an uncannily clear speaker with very precise pronunciation, a huge vocabulary, and a wide variety of sentence structures at her disposal. Embarrassingly, she has taken to asking me whether various children have "accents," and when I inform her no, they do not, she says, "Then why do they talk like that?" It is embarrassing, as I am well aware that she is the oddity, not them.
--Yesterday Daisy had a big "jealous" moment. It was when Mark was playing the guitar at a party. Daisy embarrassed me by stating loudly and clearly that she did not want him to play, and then asking after every song whether that would be the last one. I pulled her aside and she explained to me, "I am jealous, Mama." The reason was that she wanted her father to pay attention to her and talk to her, rather than perform for the party. I convinced her to sit with me and watch, though she continued to tell me periodically, "I am jealous." It is not a pleasant trait, but I know it's a human one and one that children are bound to feel, so I didn't think I should squash her brutally. But we need to work on this somehow. She is definitely grappling with her dark side and brings it up for conversation fairly frequently.
--Another incident occurred at ballet class on Saturday. Daisy was waiting her turn to do something, and I'm sure as she sits there she is thinking (the neat thing is that now she's old enough to share with us trains of thought, or things she was imagining, etc.). I saw a pissed-off look cross her face, and she even put her hands on her hips and made a little defiant face. Then she stood up and said in front of the whole ballet class, to my mortification, "Mama, when I'm having a playdate I want you only to pay attention to me!" I don't know which playdate she was recalling, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with ballet class and just happened to be something she was brooding on. I can tell she knows she is having an emotion that is considered less than admirable because she always gets a dark, sort of guilty look on her face, coupled with defiance, when she decides to declare one of these feelings to me. It is these times when I feel unlucky to have an articulate child. I am pretty sure other children must be having these unattractive emotions too, but instead of screaming or crying or having a tantrum, mine has to state loudly and with perfect clarity exactly which unattractive emotion she is experiencing, for the whole world to hear.
--Yeah, so... she is grappling with these less than wonderful emotions, which I know we all have and deny to varying degrees. But at the same time, she is so sweet and affectionate and wonderful. The great majority of the time, she is full of joie de vivre. She runs and skips and laughs and dances around, and sings! And she has great love for her friends. She is more and more social all the time. I felt we had crossed an important line when she told me recently that it was fine that I would be there (at her swimming lesson), but what friends her own age would be there? In the past, as long as I was going to be with her, she'd be fine, or she'd see me as the ideal playmate. Now, I'm hearing more and more from her that she would like to play with kids her own age.
--She has made great strides physically lately. She is still very delayed, by a year or more, in the gross motor skills department. That means I'm comparing her gains to where she was before, not to other kids her own age. She did a somersault for the first time recently after having been taught by a teacher at her Little Gym class, Jazzy Bugs. This is a new thing--she had asked me to take "tap and jazz" lessons, and a friend recommended the Little Gym's program. Daisy is loving it. They do half an hour of dancing--tap and ballet--and then half an hour in the gym. To my surprise, the gym part is Daisy's favorite. It gladdens my heart to see the way she runs off without me, getting comfortable almost immediately with new adults and new kids. And even though she doesn't have the same level of skills as kids her age, she is trying everything and continually pushing past her own limits-- jumping from high places, somersaulting, and the other day she tried walking on hands and feet along two parallel bars. She surprises me all the time, trying things I would have predicted she would refuse to try. She now bolts up the stairs using one foot per stair, when for years she had to walk slowly and put both feet on every stair. She is just blossoming!
--I think 3.5-4 has been a golden time. She's still fun and silly and has some little kid qualities, but more and more she is my big kid who can converse with me about a lot of things and is increasingly inhabiting the social world. I think I will miss the little kid silliness and lack of inhibition and it will be sort of sad to see her growing all self-conscious, but I know that's also part of becoming a member of society-- becoming aware of the impression you make on other people, of their thoughts and perspectives, etc.
--She is pretty easy. Almost everything can be discussed now. A tantrum/truly degraded moment is a great rarity. She is a skilled procrastinator, but that mostly affects her doting grandma, not her parents. She even agrees to stay in bed till 7 now, although she has the annoying tendency to ask every minute (starting from 6:45 or so, when she's awake then), "Is it 7 now?" I really have to teach her to read her clock. (Well--she can read it, but she doesn't know the math to understand how many more minutes are entailed until 7.) Most of the time, it feels like I am living with a pretty reasonable person who can be counted on to do her part in getting us through the day. Again, I will miss the baby Daisy, but this is a pretty good time.
posted by Sarah Goss at 3:55 PM
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