Lorelei has come in to wake me up in the morning for a long long time. For a few months I tried setting an alarm and getting up early, but lately, not so much. For about a month now when she comes in she asks, “momma, can I come snuggle with you?”. And then my heart explodes, and I pull off the covers to let her come snuggle. It’s 100% the best part of my day. I’m glad she’s growing up, but when this ends I’ll miss it forever.
She is growing up. Last post I talked about this huge brain leap she had. She started asking questions about why things were happening, not just if they were. This week she said a couple other things that really highlight the newer, more mature, Lorelei. I take a few medicines and fill up a week holder at once. Lorelei LOVES to help with this process. Because reasons I had Pip do it one time. When she noticed she collapsed crying, because it’s devastating. Once she composed herself she told Pip in a calm voice, “I got upset when you helped mamma fill her pills”. She was articulate, expressed her feelings but wasn’t whiney or manipulative. OMG. Yesterday I was helping her get ready and doing other things at the same time. She told me, “Mommy, you distracted me from putting on my pants”. She also encourages me sometimes in my daily life and tells me, “you’re doing a good job”. It’s just fun!
My last Lorelei anecdotes are tales of curiosity, independence, and linguistic confusion. She saw a bumblebee on the grass and decided to poke it with her finger. Not surprisingly, it stung her. She cried but she’s very hardy and rallied quickly. Later she told Pip, "I tried to make it dead". She failed. The kids are taking swimming lessons right now. During a recent class the teacher passed out life preservers and said they could put them on or wait for help. Five little preschoolers sat there waiting, and Lorelei stood up to try to do it herself. That’s my daughter! Lastly, she goes to community centers with Chiara, our au pair. They’re like indoor playgrounds. Indoor is good since all our outdoor playgrounds are wet 9 months of the year. There’s one she visits in the town of Ballard, and she can’t pronounce community. So one day she told me, “Today we went to the ballerina commoodidy center! *pause* [disappointed and shaking her head] but there were no ballerinas”. I hugged her while laughing hysterically on the inside. Ballerina was clearly a mondegreen for Ballard. A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. The most common examples are misheard lyrics. I often mishear the people around me and love the justaposition of what I heard vs what they said. Lorelei now has the vocabulary that this happens in funnier ways now and I delight every time.
Moriarty is also growing up. He spends more time on his own, entertaining himself. He’s also become a kinder big brother. He’s made a new maturity leap! He plays more games with her, usually ones he makes up, but sometimes he lets her win. He’s also become more polite with me. He just started saying thank you for basic stuff I’ve always done for him. He’s focusing better at taekwondo and earned his 2nd level yellow belt and breaking a board. He’s doing better in school. At the beginning of the year he was having a harder time and not meeting grade expectations. Now he’s well into the average range for his class! His reading skills taking off are probably a big part of that. He reads street and business signs when we’re out of the house. He’s reading books at home and just changing. We read to him too. Pip read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Moriarty and me. I’m going to read Westing Game to him next. My mom loved that book so much. It’s a kid murder mystery!
He has also graduated from Minecraft to Zelda. He’s obsessed. He starts sentences with “To get to the blah blah you have to get the blah and go to blah”. As you can see, I have no idea what he’s talking about, ever. It’s one thing to have a conversation about Zelda, but he just starts, out of the blue, talking about some arcane detail. It’s both amusing and crazy making. We have a No Zelda rule at the table now. I couldn’t handle it. He has other growing interests too. He’s been doing more art, mostly marker drawings. I got him a blank notebook and he’s filling it up with art. Some Zelda-related, of course, some Pokemon, some nature, and some just ideas in his head. He’s in a very literal phase and asks edge-case seeking questions until I crack. He’s Pip, but shorter. Luckily I like Pip! Watching Moriarty grow up is incredible and it highlights that these preschool years are nearly over and we’re entering a new phase of parent life.
New photos are here, password mal
Moriarty laughing so hard he couldn’t walk