Our little Pooh Bear

Monkey was sitting on the couch reading the giant A.A. Milne collection and her Daddy came in from putting away dishes.

"What are you doing, Monkey?"

I replied that she was reading Pooh Bear. Daddy said, "You're a Pooh Bear, Monkey!"

"No! I am not a Pooh Bear! THIS [pointing to an illustration of Pooh Bear] is Pooh Bear."

"You're a Pooh Bear!" he repeated.

"I am NOT a Pooh Bear. THIS is Pooh Bear."

"You're a Pooh Bear!" he repeated again.

"I AM NOT A POOH BEAR! THIS is a Pooh Bear. Go back in the kitchen, Daddy!"

Eine Kleine Narcissism

She repeatedly asked to watch the video of herself saying the Jabberwocky. Again. And again. And again.

She now knows how to say, "No narcissism here."

Don't throw me in dat dere Briar Patch!

Today she directly disobeyed me by doing exactly the opposite of what I had told her to do. She knows that we will first give her an opportunity to fix the problem, and then we will put her in her crib until she agrees to acknowledge what she did and to fix the problem. I began the first step of the process, which triggered a tantrum, and then I started into the "you're going to have to go into your crib" part. She knew it was coming, and she headed me off at the pass:

"Can I go in my crib?"

It was like talking to Brer Rabbit.

I asked her to repeat herself, which she did, and then I told her she could not go into her crib. Instead, she had to go to the red chair and sit in it until she could tell me what she did and agree to fix it. She sat down in the chair and said, "Can Ellie look out the window?" No, you must sit there. What did you do wrong, Ellie? "I don't remember." I asked again. "No, I'm not going to tell you what I did wrong. I'm just going to sit and think about it."

It's getting harder and harder to keep a straight face when I discipline her.

Exotic farm

As she was playing with her Fisher Price farm playset, she began to list off the animals inside: "Horsey, cow, zebra . . ." I (quite reasonably, I thought) asked her, "What's a zebra doing in your farm?" "He's looking out the window." Ah. I see.

Later, I texted her father to tell him the above and he replied that he missed her. So I thought I would have her say something I could text back to him. I said, "What do you want to say to Daddy?" And she responded with the line he repeats to her at every meal (and every other opportunity) daily: "It's always fun to be neat and clean!" He was touched.

Nursing and mushrooms

Monkey has had some good ones today. I'll just list them briefly because otherwise I'll miss the next one while I'm busy typing!

This morning, as her little brother was expressing little interest in nursing (a rare occasion indeed), Monkey asked if he was eating. She watched for a moment and, when he didn't eat, she laughed and said "Oh, he's not hungry." Suddenly, he lunged at me like a python, mouth open, and Monkey said, "Oh! He latched on! Good!"

We had an incident today with a young man at Bible study who is about Monkey's age. He's a sweet little guy but he was having some sharing issues today. Kids will be kids. Monkey had my car keys and was playing with the flashlight on the key chain. The little boy took an interest in it and proceeded to grasp Monkey's wrist firmly and remove the car keys rather forcefully so that he could play with the flashlight. She looked at him for a moment, and then stepped toward me and said, "Could you give them to my mommy?" No shrieking, no "gimme," no "mine!" Just, "Could you give them to my mommy?" I about melted.

Tonight she is playing with her little counting playset that consists of cans of vegetables, each containing a certain number of plastic vegetables between one and ten. She had the number 7 container, which is mushrooms, and she was trying to put them into another container. (This is what she does for fun: she moves things from one container to another.) When they popped out of the box into which she was trying to place them, she became exasperated and said, "Go in the box, mushrooms. Go in the box now. You mushrooms, go in the box." They must have been listening because soon all of them were gathered neatly into her box. Good mushrooms!

Movie night

So Gramma and Grampa are taking the Monkey for the night this weekend. I'm pretty excited about it because it means that, though we'll have her little brother with us, we will have a chance to have a date night without a toddler. Matt was putting a gift card given to us as a Christmas gift into his wallet in preparation (Yes, it's Thursday, and we're already prepping for Saturday's date night, which should not necessarily be an indication of our eagerness) and I exclaimed, "Hooray! Date night!" Upon hearing me, the Monkey said, "Hooray! Date night!" Daddy explained that she would be having a date night with her grandparents, to which she said, "Hooray! I will watch movies with Gramma and Grampa! Probly, um, maybe, Curious George?"

Good to know she's already putting together her itinerary for her trip. :)

Muscrap

So it's kind of a long story how we started calling pork roast "muskrat," which then became "muskrap" in Monkey's vocabulary. It's all traceable to a pork tenderloin that I made that, in its finished state, looked a bit like it had a head and little legs and a tail. Matt peered into the pan and said, "I'm sure it's good, but that looks a lot like a muskrat." At dinner, Monkey was refusing to eat and Matt told her that she had to eat, and that it was muskrat, which was a delicacy and she would really like it if she tried it. She announced that she would not eat "muskrap." But then she tasted it and finished it all.

We had "muskrap" again last weekend. But, on leftover night, Monkey once again was refusing to eat it without a full complement of cranberry sauce. In fact, she announced that she would like simply to have the cranberry sauce. No muskrap was contemplated. Daddy told her, as he so often does, that everyone knows that you can't have cranberry without eating your muskrap. She refused. So he got out the cranberry sauce and said, "Okay, Monkey. Are you ready?" She peered at the cranberry sauce, leaned toward it from her high chair, and said, "I'm not ready for muskrap."

We did, in fact, get her to eat it. Quite a bit of it, actually. But it involved a healthy serving of cranberry sauce. In the process, Matt tried to feed her a piece of broccoli sans cranberry. We knew we'd done wrong when she announced, "The thing is, you have to feed me cranberry with the bockies."

I feel as if I'm talking to an 80-year-old trapped in tiny footy pajamas.