My Precious Girl is Three!
Wow - Three years ago today - I became a mommy. Well, not really. I was always a mommy - I was just waiting for my kids to arrive. I never imagined that motherhood would be so great, so fulfilling, so exciting, yet so boring, so frustrating, so challenging and so unbelievably tiring all at the same time…
Rosie has been a bit of a handful lately (to put it mildly). She is definitely asserting her independence. She wants to make her own decisions, and we usually give her the freedom to choose her clothes, shoes, meals, what the activities of the day are (within limits), etc. Somehow, that is not enough anymore. Most of my questions, comments, and instructions are met with a bratty “NO!” these days.
Oh the patience it takes to stay sane. 8am Mama is a completely different person from 8pm Mama.
8am Mama starts the day off so patient and waits for Rosie’s slow-as-molasses walking, takes time to make sure she is engaged in whatever activity she wants - especially when traveling in the car, picking up whatever toys she has dropped (repeatedly), reads the same books over and over, doesn’t complain when she gets 10 different cups out of the cabinet and fills each one up with an inch of water and spills water all over the ground, patiently cleans up the spilled water along with the microscopic bits of paper from when she uses her scissors to cut up her coloring book, then calmly takes the scissors out of Sammy’s mouth while gently reminding her that I didn’t want her to use scissors when Sammy was awake.
On the other hand - 8pm Mama tends to say “come ON Rosie - hurry up” when we are walking somewhere, brusquely tosses toys her way with instructions to stop dropping them, refuses to read books more than once (and has been known to skip several pages to expedite the process), exasperatedly sighs “aaaargh” when cleaning up the mess from several cups half filled with water, yells “I TOLD you no cutting right now” while grumbling about cleaning up paper and how dangerous scissors are.
On more than one occasion, I know I have muttered something about “driving me crazy” which I didn’t realize Rosie heard until she repeated her version of that phrase to me last weekend. I think Rosie was trying to listen to music in the car and Joe and I were having a conversation and laughing - and Rosie instructed us to “stop laughing” and we said “why do you want us to stop laughing?” and Rosie replied “Because you are making me drive crazy”.
She just got her first “official” haircut last Friday - just to trim and even things up (as all I ever really did was trim her bangs and the back to eliminate her mullet look) and her curls are even more evident now. Everywhere we go, people comment on her hair - calling her “curly girl” “goldilocks” etc. The barista at the Starbucks drive-thru said “her hair is so gorgeous - those curls - is it natural?”. I wanted to say - “Nah - I gave her a perm”….
She loves to laugh, sing, dance, play with bubbles, splash in the kiddie pool, play on the swingset, play in the sandbox, go for walks, go to the park, go to the zoo, go to the library. She is a non-stop bundle of energy. She loves to get her fingernails and toenails painted and she is very good at staying “still like a statue” until they dry. She loves to put lotion on and will go through a whole tub of lotion, greasing up her entire body if I would let her. She still wants to wear dresses every day - the fancier the better. Usually I have to convince her to wear shorts underneath, or “park pants” as we are frequently at parks - sliding or doing activities that require some sort of leg/bottom covering.
I watched her sleep the other morning, and I was amazed by her long legs, splayed out across her big bed, looking at her long, lean body - and thinking “wow - that body, that little person grew inside me”. I can hardly remember how it felt to hold her newborn body in my arms. When did she become a child? I can’t believe she is already 3 years old. It seems like just yesterday that she was born, yet I feel like she has always been in my life. It is that weird motherhood time warp where time seems to go by so quickly, yet slowly at the same time.
Happy Birthday my precious, sweet Rosemary. I love you so much!
