3.75

Sweet Heidi, my tiny sprite, my little koala, the barnacle on my boat.  She is still so much my little shadow.  Sometimes it sneaks up on me, how much more independent than she was six months ago.  We went sledding last weekend and she was zooming down the hill by herself or with Nona, or playing the big sibling to Fritz.  She will go off and play at the neighbors' houses without me sometimes.  We have worked some independent play into our mid-day routine while I am putting Fritz to bed, and it's fun to peek at her through the crack in the door and see her playing dollhouse or digging through the craft materials.

School is going well.  Her teacher left over the summer and they hadn't hired a replacement by September.  I was very nervous about this.  The assistant director of the school filled in until the hired a new teacher in October, and the new teacher is great!  Maybe even an upgrade.  Heidi has taken to Miss Melissa and they have been working hard on practical life and math lessons.  Her favorite work is puzzles, the color wheel, counting, and sewing.  Best friends are Liv and Daisy.  She says all the boys in her class are mean, except Elijah.

Her favorite things to do at home are crafts/art/coloring with Ingrid, watching movies with Dad, playing trains and blocks with Fritz, and reading stories with me.  Much like her older brother, she doesn't do much on her own and strongly prefers an activity with a buddy.  If we play hooky, her favorite outing is the Children's Museum (with requisite visit to the neighboring candy store).

Rooster had a few big milestones this quarter: first, she dropped the night-time pull-ups!  Must have happened sometime in September, because we packed them when we went to Chicago for Labor Day, but not for the early October trip to Seattle.  Second, she more or less dropped the nap.  This has just been in the last few weeks.  We got to the point where it was hard to get her down and hard to get her up and hard to get her back to bed.  Time to give it up.  Now she curls up on the couch while I put Fritz to bed.  Sometimes she dozes off; usually she just watches a movie.  She is handling it well; I am a smidge weary by the end of the day since no-nap means I have zero child-free minutes between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m.  And finally, she chopped her hair!  Heidi had been asking for several weeks to get her hair cut short like Nona.  When we finally got in for hair cuts in October, I thought she would chicken out, but she went for it!  And it's adorable!  I think it gave her a boost of confidence, because so many people told her how great it looked.  Now she walks by a mirror and gives her hair a little shake and does a little shimmy.  School photos were the following week and she loved showing it off.  The photographer even featured her on her school photos page -- because obviously Heidi is the cutest child in at any school she photographed.

Though she's more athletic that Ingrid, Heidi has funny little mannerisms that are so girly.  When she gets dressed, she instinctively poses like a runway model -- hand on the hip, sideways pop.  When she does a trick, she finishes like she stuck the landing for the gold medal in the gymnastics floor routine.  When she wants me to paint her nails, she extends her arm with the fingers arrayed like she expects me to bow and kiss her hand.

Who poses like this?

We signed Heidi up for dance and skating this fall because she loved both of them so much last season.  Then we started off to the first class of each and she flat-out refused to go when she realized I would not be dancing/skating with her this time.  She simply does not accept that she has aged out of the mommy-and-toddler phase.  I even try to get her to do gymnastics at the same time as Ingrid, in the awesome-looking room with a giant window where I can stare right at her, so that she can have fun and run around instead of climbing all over me and whining for an hour every Tuesday.  No.

Three is a hard age because she wants so badly to do so many things.  She sees all the big kid things and wants to do them, and sometimes could do them, and doesn't cope when it's not possible.  Ingrid spends all afternoon running around with her friends.  Heidi wails, "Why can't I see my friends?????"  Lovey, you're old enough for play dates, but all of your friends live outside the neighborhood and require advance planning and adult supervision.  It's not as simple as running down the block (which you also can't do alone).  Same thing when Ingrid and Henry do grownup tasks.  They're largely competent at many things now.  When we got the Christmas tree last weekend, Henry chopped the whole thing down himself and Ingrid can decorate as well as I can.  Heidi wants so badly to help, but she must have dropped every single glass ornament she touched.  I try really hard not to get stressed by tiny people "helping," but she knew she was making things worse and felt bad about it.

But she is getting bigger every day.  She has been much more even-keel and fun to be around in the few months since school started, with far fewer freak-outs and far more reasonable resolutions to her problems.  She has been really into Dad for the last couple of weeks, which has been nice.  Karl gets more cuddles and I get a breather from my tiny barnacle.  She is more confident and willing to venture out in the world with whomever is doing something fun, whether it's me, Karl, a sibling, or a grandparent.  Four is coming up fast and I think it will be a great year.