Olive catch-up, Thanksgiving Edition

Tough tough tough to keep up with this! I have tons to catch up on, so here goes.

15 weeks pregnant and feeling great (meaning, sick, big, all the right things for being preggers).

On to Olive!!! She just had her 3rd birthday and it was so much fun. Before this party, and I'd say for almost 5 months, we've been talking about 'when you're three' and she's been saying things like, 'when I'm three, I'll go to the potty by myself', 'when I'm three, I'll sleep in my big girl bed by myself', etc etc etc. So now when I say, 'Wow! You're three now! You can go to sleep by yourself!' she replys..."I'm not three I'm two! No...I'm three, but I love you so much that I want you to sleep with me". So what can I do really. She's really affectionate lately, definitely telling us just how much she loves us all the time, especially saying things like, "I want to hold your hand because I love you so much" and "I want to sit beside you because I love you so much". She tells us she wants to be the Real Mary Poppins when she grows up, or on occasion she tells me she wants to be me when she grows up (sigh, blush). Soooo sweet.

The other day, after reading a particularly compelling article in Mothering Magazine (that I can never make up my mind about-- they're pretty much ALL attachment parenting or else tons of guilt, so I don't often subject myself) but this article was all about intuition. It was saying that we should try to remember to help our kids to trust their guts and hearts more, instead of always just focusing on what's taught to them as right and wrong. It was a great, thought-provoking article, and it's made me really think about how I interact sometimes with O. We were sitting at the dinner table, and I asked her "Where did you come from?" (a question that the article said was a good one to ask kids right after they've begun to first speak-- which Olive has been doing now for two years...) and this was pretty much her response-- paraphrasing:

Well, Mommy and I were at the hospital and I came out, and then we held hands and walked up the sidewalk to Daddy's house, then he opened the door and we said, "We're HERE!!!"

Awesome.

On the other side of things, and realizing that she's getting older and every subject must be covered, we took the tadpole home with us from her school to babysit while her teachers were away on a conference, and she often brought up to me that Herman wasn't at school anymore (the Hermit Crab) because Herman was dead. She followed up by saying maybe after the tadpole turns into a frog and leaves that they'll get another hermit crab and name it something, like Herman, Crab-crab, or Bon-Bon.

She still is madly in love with Mary Poppins, but now it's just like a normal-as-breathing type thing to hear her (or any of us really, it's hard to control) singing any or all of the songs from the movie. She does an especially great rendition of "Cast off the Shackles" as she calls it, the mother Winifred's song about being a suffragette. She sings the whole song in a British accent, and it's pretty remarkable her pitch (that's across the board).

Last night we watched a video tape I got at a thrift store for $1 of the Slovakian Ballet doing the Nutcracker. It was good- an hour long, and she watched the whole thing. I took her to this ballet performance by the Triangle Youth Ballet (or something like that) in Raleigh that was Alice in Wonderland (so we've been reading that book more, and it's as weird as ever) and Fancy Nancy's Bonjour Butterfly, and she was riveted. It was cool to see her so engaged. I asked her last night if she'd like to take a ballet class, and she was FAR more concerned with just getting on the stage "with you mommy". She even asked me to tell her a story about her getting on stage before going to bed. I'd gotten her a tiny magnet booklet where it's dancers that you can put costumes on, and we hadn't played with it in forever, but she asked after watching the Nutcracker last night if we could play with that. After asking her, 'can you describe it for me?' a million times, she finally did describe it in detail, we found it, and she had a great time making them dance all over the place. She's into dancing, and needs some new ballet shoes! I'd like to find a modern or other kind of dance to take her to, knowing that things wouldn't get too weird-- the trouble with some modern dance...

At any rate, I'm so grateful for who Olive is, and thankful for the million ways Andy is an outstanding father and husband. I think she's as happy as she is because our family is happy. We are so very lucky, and while it's painful to think of the moments in the future when Olive isn't the only child, I do think that she's going to be an incredible big sister (she was teaching her doll how to properly pet the cat yesterday, instructing Big Baby to rub from top to bottom, and not to pull her tail, Gus doesn't like that and might scratch).

Here's some photos from the b-day event, and her TOTAL EXCITEMENT wearing the fairy outfit that Kendall/Lather gave her for her birthday: