Besides Zoe and Leo, the biggest thing going on for Sam now is school. She is starting her third year of Montessori next week, which is the equivalent of kindergarten. She will be in school from 9am-3pm this year. They call it “extended day” at her school. When she started there two years ago, she couldn’t even pronounce “extended day.” Now, she is a true little-kid: looking forward to showing off her new lunch box, eating lunch with her friends, and bossing – I mean, showing the little kids how to do the work properly. She reads and writes, does addition and subtraction, and can take care of a lot of her own needs without adult help. She is even old enough to truly miss her teachers. She keeps talking about them and I can tell that she is not just mimicking the feeling, but truly longs to see them again and get back to school.

This summer has shown us another great leap in Sammy’s development. She seems to have learned how to practice and to accept help. She spent a lot of time this summer writing her letters and numbers – she has most of them down now, which is a great improvement. The motivation is her own. She sits down to work on it without prompting. But even better, she will sometimes ask me for help. If I give too much, she gets angry, but she will take minimal help if I get it just right. This has been a challenge for her (and me!) in the past. She is so fiercely independent that she would say, “Mommy, can you help me?” but then rebel as soon as I gave her the tiniest bit of instruction. (Then she would give up.) Now, she will allow me to write a letter on her paper so that she can have a model to copy. If I tell her a letter is backwards she doesn’t yell at me and tell me I’m wrong or that she wants to do it “her own way.” If I do it properly – not too often, and offered as a choice to her such as, “do you want to see the right way?” – she actually wants to know the right way! (Of course, I’ve also explained to her why there is a right way.) I’m learning a lot about how I’m going to have to work with her once I become her teacher. And I can finally see that it might indeed be possible for us to homeschool without destroying our relationship. I’m going to have to work extra, extra hard at providing the most minimal “instruction” possible, and I’m going to have to tune in to what motivates her. It would be so much easier if she’d just swallow what I want her to learn. Damn those independent minds and wills that children have!

We eliminated Sam’s afternoon nap as a part of our regular routine after she was having some trouble sleeping. Now, she takes a nap if she feels tired. She’ll just disappear and go upstairs and nap. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to see my child knowing herself and her needs, and taking care of it all on her own. I definitely got the timing right on this one.

Bedtime is still a parent-directed activity, partially because I believe she still needs guidance to get the amount of sleep she requires, but also because we all enjoy bedtime so much. When I’ve talked to her about how things will change with two new babies in the house, I’ve asked her what special times she most wants us to keep untouched. The first thing she said was reading books at bed time. Adam and I have been taking turns putting her to bed since she was about a year old (we did it together before that). It’s a long routine that can take close to an hour. We might have to shorten it somewhat, but we’ll never take it away from her, as long as she wants it.

Also at bedtime, we’ve tried to allow Sammy more freedom in coming out of her room. She still wears pull-ups (and there’s no end in sight to that) so she doesn’t need to come out to use the bathroom, but sometimes she wants to get water or a snack. We’ve gone through periods where we allow this, and periods where we don’t, because she’ll abuse the privilege and start coming into our bedroom to chat, or sitting in the hall to play with the cat. The night before I went into labor, she was in one of her “wandering around the house” phases and just wouldn’t get to bed. I called her into my room where I was lying in bed like a beached whale and I cried in frustration, telling her that I needed rest too, and would she please just go into her own room out of respect for me. She got it, and went right to bed. But it doesn’t always work that way. There are still nights when we struggle to get her to bed and there is a lot of yelling and crying. I know she does not want to be controlled, but I don’t know how else to ensure she gets her sleep, and also to make sure Adam and I have our own time together. I’d let her have the run of the house if she could restrain herself from knocking on our door or making a lot of noise, but she’s not there yet. And most nights, she does go to sleep right away, so overall, the situation is tolerable. But I know we’ll all be happy when she is just a bit more mature and we can let go of this control.

Something that is shocking to me is that Sammy has recently developed the high-energy that I expect to see out of a two- or three-year-old. She’s always been so calm (compared to most kids) that I thought we were in the clear. But I guess I forgot that when it comes to anything physical, Sammy is way behind her peers. Now she’s bouncing off the walls and having trouble focusing and listening. She needs a lot of physical activity to get through a day without going stir crazy. It’s strange that I finally have one of “those” kids, but at least I’ll be a little bit more prepared if Leo and/or Zoe are the hyper type.

Sometime just in the past few weeks, Sammy developed a new laugh. Her toddler giggle still comes out, but sometimes this completely different laugh escapes her. It’s loud and, well, I guess I’d describe it as jolly. It’s her little-girl laugh. It could come from a ten-year-old. It’s funny how it just came out of nowhere like that, instead of morphing, as I would have expected. For now, we get both laughs, but I know it won’t last long. I’m going to have to be sure to take a lot of video before the toddler laugh disappears altogether.

Even with all of these changes, Sammy would tell you that the most important thing about turning five is that now she can have two gummy vitamins instead of just one!

We’ve had a couple of days with Leo at home now, and we’re learning what Sammy is like as a big sister. So far, so good. It’s going to be interesting to watch her as the novelty wears off. If I can keep my cool, I might learn a lot about “my oldest daughter” in the next few months.

I visited a friend a couple of weeks ago who has a two-month-old baby – her first.  Of course, we talked about all the usual suspects – breastfeeding, getting out of the house, the difference between gas and a giggle, etc.  I found myself saying things like, “Oh, yeah, I had forgotten about that!” and “Don’t worry, she’ll grow out of that soon.”  But when the baby made some gurgling noises and my friend said, “You’re so cute!  Everything you do is the cutest thing ever!”  I said, “That part never changes.”

It’s almost unbearable – how much I love Sam right now.  I spend a lot of time just looking at her.  I’m finding her to be more and more beautiful as she grows older.  I wonder, is that because she really is beautiful, or because  she looks like me, or because she looks like Adam, or just because she’s my daughter and I’ve raised her since she was born?  I suppose, as another friend wisely told me, it’s all of the above.

When Adam puts Sam down for bed at night, sometimes she’ll run back out of her room to turn off the hall light, and she’ll come into my room (I lie in bed every chance I get right now) to sneak in one last goodnight.  For some reason, this is when I see her the most objectively.  I’m wrapped up in a TV show or a book and suddenly there is this adorable little person in my doorway blowing me a kiss.  Oh my god – is that really her?  Is she really that tall, her hair that long, her voice that sweet, her manner that grown up?  Then she runs back to her room – because she seems to have forgotten how to walk – and I hear her tiny voice through the wall, talking and singing with Adam.  I feel it so strongly at those moments that I have to say it out loud: “God, I love that girl.”

The past six months have been a period of extraordinary growth for Sam. First, she turned an important corner in school.  Last year, she fell into the role of “the baby” of the classroom.  She allowed the older girls to treat her like a baby (she was the smallest), and she did not act independently.  At home, she showed a great deal of independence, taking care of herself and her needs to a great degree, choosing her own clothes and activities, and playing by herself a great deal.  But at school, she would not choose a piece of work without first asking the teacher if it was okay.  She would not have her snack without asking.  She didn’t show interest in learning new things and needed someone to guide her through her day.  Sometime early this school year, that all changed.  She is finally acting like a Montessori kid at school.  She still gravitates towards work that she knows and can do well (this is the personality trait of hers that concerns me so much), but she is making her own choices.  She tells me that she actually skips her snack most days because she would rather “choose another piece of work.”

Academically (if you can call anything done at this age academic), Sam has been struggling with her fine motor skills.  It’s something of a problem because she hasn’t been able to write her letters or numbers well, and a lot of the school work she is ready for in every other way requires writing.  We’ve been working on it a bit at home, and I know her teacher nudges her to focus on those skills.  (I like a Montessori teacher who nudges instead of leaving it wholly up to the child.)  Just in the past month or so, I’ve seen a huge leap in her writing abilities.  Her drawings of faces have become, not only more realistic and “organized” (which I take as a sign of her learning to organize her visual perceptions into something akin to visual concepts), but more precise and neat (which is more about controlling the pen).  I think she was a bit slow on both the organization of input and control of output, but both seem to be improving together.  As I mentioned recently, she can finally write her name somewhat legibly.  And now, she seems to be quickly learning how to write more and more letters and numbers.  A few days ago, she was able to write this note in a birthday card.  (“Too Natalee From asee Sammee” – asee was her first mixed up attempt at her name.)   I guided her hand for the letters “r” and “N” and I helped her sound out “Natalee” but she did the rest by herself:

Sam has gone through a long and intense numbers phase recently, and moved quickly from the early Montessori numbers work up to the stamp game, which involves writing the numerals.  I’m not sure if the teachers are helping her with the writing part, but she is doing the stamp game regularly.  At home, it shows.  We’ve always played games like counting the M&M’s of each color and then adding them to find out how many M&M’s there are altogether.  She was hit or miss with this six months ago, but now she seems to really get the concept.  She even did a little subtraction a few days ago when one of her butterflies died.  She said, “There were five butterflies and then one died, so now there are only four.  And when the other four die, there will be zero butterflies.  That means none.”  Wow!

Intellectually, Sammy has entered some kind of creative period.  She is taking ideas and rearranging them now.  She can actually make up original stories, which is new.  She’s always been big on role-playing with her dolls.  She has had them talking to each other and going to the playground and going to sleep and acting out all kinds of situations since she was two.  But all of the dialog and the actions had always come straight from her real life, or sometimes from a TV show or movie.  And she has never, ever, told a story to me beyond, “Once upon a time, Little Bear went to the water park and went swimming. The end.”  And she would only tell that story because I had just told it to her, but with more detail.  Basically, she could sum up.  Now, she tells me about movies – but they are movies that she has made up in her head.  ”Mommy, you know what?  There is this movie about a prince.  And he goes into the ice and slips and falls.  And there is a dragon who comes to save him.  And the dragon takes him to the princess and they make cookies and get married and live happily ever after.”  At first I thought she saw a movie at a friend’s house that I missed, but she’s told me about a few other movies, and some of them are obviously too kooky to be real.  It’s not much of a story, I know, but it’s the first time she has done this.

Her creativity shows in other ways.  She has made a few real jokes.  I wish I could have captured them, but I lost them in the disorganized mess that is my mind right now.  She loves to make up silly rhymes, and some of them are quite clever.  I enjoy this a lot, because Adam and I are big on making up songs, and now all three of us can do it together.  Even her roughhousing time with her dad is different now.  The two of them do a lot of wrestling and tickling and physical goofing around.  Adam plays the Big Bad Wolf and eats up Sammy’s belly button, or gobbles up her back saying, “I want my baby back baby back baby back ribs.  NEEDS MORE SAUCE.”  You know, all that stuff that dads do.  The other night, Adam was crawling into the room in a scary way to get Sam and I yelled out, “Look out – the zombie is coming to get you!”  After he attacked her and was munching on her belly, she cried out, “Daddy stop!  Zombies don’t eat Sammies!”  In the past, she might have mimicked something like that, but she didn’t have the creativity to make it up.  Now she does stuff like that all the time.

Unfortunately, Sam is less and less cuddly.  I’m always touching her and she has to tell me to knock it off.  She rarely likes to be in a helpless position, like lying on my chest.  She’d rather sit next to me than on my lap.  But, she makes up for this by giving me unprompted hugs and kisses and telling me that she loves me.  She also says things like, “You are a very, very very, very nice mommy”  and “I really, really, really like you, Mommy.”  She genuinely thanks me when I do something she appreciates.  Her affection is real, and the older she gets, the more that means to me.  Maybe she even thinks that every little thing I do is magic, too.

I’ll write about Sam’s birthday party (parties) later, along with photos.  But I’ll include this picture for now, since it captures an expression on Sam’s face that seems to be typical of this age for her: a combination of shyness and excitement:

Back in March, I wrote about how Sam fell in love with tap dancing. I was ready to sign her up for lessons during the summer, but there wasn’t anything available so we did the Tumbles thing instead, which worked out very well.  After seeing how she behaved at Tumbles in the beginning, I’m relieved we didn’t commit to a series of dance lessons back then. Sam was completely unable to follow instructions in a class like that.  She would have stood still and watched and learned nothing.  But now, after Tumbles, and being just a few months older, she is ready.  She starts ballet and tap lessons on Monday.  She tried on her tights and leotard last night and I think she might actually put up with wearing them in order to look pretty and learn how to dance.

Yesterday was the first day of her second year of Montessori.  I remember when she started last year, how intimidated I was by the older kids.  I wonder if she felt the same way.  This year, she’s a middle kid.  (Montessori primary classes are made up of 3-6 year olds.)  She definitely made a lot of academic progress over the summer in her language and numbers (no thanks to our lazy Mossoff Montessori, but simply due to her own initiative).  She’s reading words on street signs and billboards when we go out and about now.  I teased her that she “snuck behind my back and learned how to read” one day, because the progress was so sudden.  She loves that, and it makes her try to read every word she sees.  She read “water” and “waste” the other day, with only a bit of help from me with the silent “e” and long “a” in waste.

We did a few counting games over the summer, and I can see that numbers are finally something of interest to her.  At the beginning of summer, she could count objects, but she’d get lost at around 8, or she would lose track with her finger or drop the object being counted and lose track of where she was.  Now, she can drop an object and pick it back up and continue counting, and she can keep track up to the mid-teens.

Sam’s observational skills continue to amaze me.  One thing that has not changed since she was about 20 months old is her awareness of the moon.  I don’t think I’ve noticed the moon once in that entire time without her pointing it out to me.  She sees it whenever it is out during daylight, and the few times we have her out at night, she always points it out to us.  I have no idea if this is common, or a particular interest of hers, but I sure do enjoy it.

But it’s not just her vision that amazes me.  Just yesterday, we were driving through an unfamiliar part of town and we stopped at a red light.  After she finished counting the red and green lights and giving me a lecture on how I should wait until my light turned green, she sniffed and said, MOMMY, I SMELL SOMETHING.  “What do you smell, Sammy?”  I SMELL A CAR WASH.  “Really?  I don’t smell anything. Maybe there is a car wash around here.”  I looked around and sure enough, there was a car wash a few doors up the block.  When I pointed it out to her she couldn’t see it from her view in the backseat.  She had identified it totally based on smell, from half a block away.  She is also sensitive to the smell of gasoline, freshly cut grass, and farts.

Oh, yeah, she’s really into the bodily function humor right now, too.  So it turns out that is not exclusively a little-boy phenomenon.

Another big thing that has developed over the past few months is whining.  I mean, Sam has whined for a while now, but this is her parental-torture-of-choice at the moment.  We work so hard at not interacting with her when she does it (and I really think we succeed most of the time) but she still does it a lot.  I say, “I hear a whining voice” or “I can’t understand you when you whine” or “Please use your normal voice” about a hundred times a day.  It’s only a phase; it’s only a phase; it’s only a phase.

Emotionally, it’s hard to judge Sam right now.  She can say things like, “I’m going to my room to calm down,” and actually do it.  This makes me so proud since we very explicitly taught her how, and modeled it ourselves.  It’s very rare that Sammy totally loses control of herself and lashes out for more than a moment.  It still happens, but it’s so much less often.  And seeing her get angry and spit, but then deliberately stop herself is so gratifying.   On the downside, I think I’m seeing more “manipulation” from Sam.  (I put that word in scare quotes because I don’t like its connotation of malice, but I don’t have a better word.)  She tends to use things like, “I miss my daddy” or “Ouch, that hurts” along with tears to get attention.  I’m sure that’s somewhat normal, but it’s tough to deal with.  I want to respect and honor her true emotions, but I don’t want to fuel a drama queen.

Of course, her conceptual development is the most joyous thing, but it’s also the hardest to describe.  I usually notice it by means of the integrations I see Sam making.  I’ve posted a bunch of Little Things that give clues to what is going on in her head, but I know they don’t capture the big picture that well.  She is definitely developing her sense of place and time, and that is new.  Recently she has been asking “how long will it take to get there?” when we go someplace new in the car, and she’s been more deliberate about her use of “later,” “tomorrow,” “earlier,” and “five minutes.”

I guess the way to capture what is going on in Sam’s head is to say that she is constantly working on Conceptual Common Denominators.  For instance, we watched The Sound of Music and we told her the Nazis were bad guys.  But then we had to convince her that not every person in a uniform was a bad guy.  Or, her friend next door went on vacation a few weeks ago and now every time her car is not in the driveway, Sam asks if she went on a trip.  Some of her errors make for the funniest stories, but I’ve been working hard at not laughing.  And when I do, I’m always sure to tell her that I’m laughing because I enjoy the connections she is making.  Not only is that true, but it’s the understatement of the year!

Happy Fourth Birthday, Samantha!

It’s been exactly two weeks since my last potty training update and it’s been the easiest two weeks I’ve had, potty-wise, since last September when we got rid of the diapers.  Sam is finally, FINALLY, using the potty regularly.  She now has what I would call “accidents:”  occasionally, she’ll leave a track or get so excited that something will come out, unbidden.  But she has completely stopped using poo as a weapon against me.  Making her clean herself up did the trick.

The more interesting part is that she has blossomed in many other ways in the past two weeks.  Her teacher says that she suddenly became much more independent at school, we’ve gotten rid of the booster seat on her dining room chair at home, and she has started working on putting on and taking off her shirt – the last major hurdle in dressing until we get to tying shoelaces.  It’s kind of strange how that one issue seemed to be holding her back in many ways.

In a week or two, we’re going to try nighttime with no diaper.  If she’s not ready, it doesn’t matter.  The ability to wake up to urinate is something that is largely physical and out of the child’s control, so I don’t plan to put any pressure on her.  But at least we’re at a point where we can try it.  I am now willing to wash sheets daily if need be, since I’m not washing out thousands of pairs of underwear.

We just returned from a great trip to New Orleans.  Adam and I lived there for a year (and got married there!), and we went back for a reunion of all the clerks of Adam’s former employer, a federal judge.  He’s been on the bench for 20 years and has had 64 clerks, and I think 47 of them came for the reunion (one from Tokyo), which shows you how deeply this man touched all of their lives.  Do you have any former employers like that?  Adam is really lucky.

We told Sammy all about “The Big Kahuna,” as the judge is called.  She seemed very nervous about meeting him and finally admitted she was scared.  With some gentle pressing, I finally found out that she was scared because she thought he was going to be really BIG, like a giant or something.  So cute.  But she met him in her usual shy manner and by the time we had attended the four scheduled events with the judge, Sam had fallen in love with him, and was really sad to leave.  For some reason, this touched me.  Sam definitely responds to some people more than to others.  It’s just another instance of her growing personality and values, and it’s wonderful.

(Incidentally, this was my first trip back to NOLA since Katrina, and I thought the city looked better than ever.  When we lived there, nothing at all looked new.  Now, there are many brand new homes and a lot of fresh paint.  This says nothing about the health of the city, since much of the restoration came from the federal money which was stolen from others, but I was still glad to see that, at least for now, The Big Easy is doing ok.)

We also ate a lot of good food, went to the Audubon Zoo (we’re zoo connoisseurs now, and this is a great one!), walked through Audubon Park, took the streetcar, drove around a lot just looking at our old haunts, walked through Jackson Square in the French Quarter and explored a bit, and swam in the hotel pool a couple of times.  Sam came everywhere with us and I feel like we filled her to the brim with new and exciting life-experiences.  She started out the trip very cranky and I was feeling like we were doomed to horrible vacations, but by Saturday night her mood improved and we ended up having a very nice time. 

A few weeks ago, Samantha got her very first “report card.”  Of course, they don’t give out real report cards in pre-school, but we had the end-of-year parent-teacher conference and Sam’s teacher filled out a form that is supposed to tell us how she is progressing.  I must say, I kind of like the formality of it and I learned a lot from that meeting (including the potty training advice that saved my sanity).

Sam’s teacher had been telling me for a month or so that Sam never chooses her work on her own, but always asks a teacher if she may use something.  In Montessori, this is not necessary, so Sam was just doing it on her own for no reason that anybody could discern.  Adam thinks that she might have been confused about it being ok for her to use someone else’s property – that she didn’t understand the idea that these things that weren’t hers were ok to use without asking.  While it’s true that Sam has a great sense of “mine and thine” (not a big issue when you eliminate the misplaced “sharing” lessons and don’t chastize your child for saying “mine” when it truly is hers), I suspected she was doing it as a way to interact with the teachers more.  When I’m with her, Sam is extremely social and talkative.  She seems to desperately need to tell every stranger about the boo-boo on her foot, the pie she had for dessert, and how Toby rides in the car with us.  When we are out and about, she is constantly talking to people.  And yet, at school, her teachers say she is “shy.”  So it made sense to me that Sam might have used the “may I use this?” questions as a way to have more interaction with the teachers, since she didn’t know how else to interact with them.  We’re not sure what the issue was, but it disappeared after that meeting, according to Sam’s teacher.  I really do think that the potty issue might have broken some kind of dependency thing in her, but that’s  just a TOOMA.

We also learned much more about what kinds of work Sam is doing in school, and it turns out that the summer activities that I picked were right on the money, as things that are both developmentally appropriate, and which Sam has interest in.  I got quite a few other ideas of activities from her teacher as well, and she is available for the first six weeks of summer if I have any questions.

I learned a few new things.  One is that Sam needs to work more on her fine motor skills.  I had always thought that she was advanced in that area, and slow on the gross motor skills, but her teacher says it is the reverse.  When you only have one child, you just have no way to know these things.  She is also more advanced in math than I had realized, having done many of the early exercises in the Montessori program.  She never talks about math, and only recently showed her interest in numbers to me, so I had no idea!  Of course, she is progressing very quickly with language, but I already knew that.

It’s hard to believe that Sam is completing her first year of school.  I know it’s pre-school, but Montessori is real school and real work.  There have been times throughout this year that I’ve thought, “Sam is spending three hours a day away from me doing the most challenging and interesting things, and I don’t get to see it.”  It would get me down, to think of all that I’m missing out on.  I want to see her write her first letter “P” and to see the look in her eyes when she first grasps that numbers are quantities.  But looking back on the year, and especially since the meeting with her teacher, I feel like it’s the best thing in the world that she spends that time apart from me.  She and I are so close, and we spend almost all of our other time together.  She has a needy streak (hence the need to talk to people constantly) and I don’t want everything to be about mommy.  The richness of her experiences at school is something I could never replicate at home.  Later, when her learning will be more abstract, it will be a completely different matter (although, of course, I’ll rethink it when the time comes).  But right now, I feel that our decision to send Sam to Montessori is one of the best parenting decisions we’ve ever made.  She is really flourishing.

But in six months – wow – how much she has changed!  I guess the two big things are the potty training and her big-girl bed, both of which I’ve written about before.  Recently we had a breakthrough that relates to both of them.  Sam woke up from her nap, used the bathroom, then went back to sleep!  This bodes well for getting rid of the nighttime diaper, but I’m not going to push it.  I tried taking away the little pot kind of potties since she was using the regular toilets most of the time, but as soon as I did, she regressed and now I’m dealing with 4-5 accidents each day again.

Of course, Sammy’s communication skills have improved a lot since September.  She can talk on the phone a little bit, although even her dad isn’t able to understand what she’s saying.  But she’s starting to understand that she needs to speak up, and that the person on the other side can hear her but not see her.  She likes to talk to strangers.  She tells them about whatever is on her mind – a little bit of the Snow White story, how she scraped her toe when she ran outside barefoot, or how her dog got an ear infection.   She uses complete sentences much of the time, although she still has the persistent pronoun problem at times.

It’s hard to tell what progress she is making in school.  She seems to like polishing and cleaning and coloring the best, but I know she does other things, too.  I am a little bit concerned because her teacher just told me that Sammy seems to feel it necessary to ask if she can do something instead of just doing it.  If you aren’t familiar with Montessori’s prepared environment, the classroom is set up so that the children (as young as 3) can walk around the room and choose what they want to work on independently.  Most of the materials have built-in feedback so that a teacher doesn’t need to tell the child if she did it right or wrong, so there is minimal adult involvement.  But Sammy apparently asks before choosing anything.  She is such a strange mix of independent and needy.  I can see both aspects of it at home, now that I’ve heard it from the teacher, but I don’t know if it is a problem and if so, what I could do about it.  It’s something to keep my eye on.

She has just learned to count.  It seems like she should have known how to do this long ago, but up until now, it’s all been just mimicking sounds.  “One, two, three…” was just a series of words for her.  She recited numbers up to twenty a long time ago (if you ignore The Number Which Must Not Be Named – fifteen), but she could not count objects past two.  She either didn’t understand the concept, or she just couldn’t coordinate pointing at things in succession and counting them.  Now, all of a sudden, she is counting everything.  I’m not sure how high she can get reliably, but with a little help (around the mid-teens), she counted 24 Goldfish crackers the other day.  Since I’m more of a math person, this is fun for me!

Sammy’s self-awareness amazes me.  She needs to work on distinguishing emotions like frustration, disappointment, or excitement, but she understands and can identify happy, sad, and angry very well.  When she is angry, sometimes she will “zip her lip” (to stop herself from yelling at us) and go up to her room on her own to calm down.  Sometimes she’ll say, I NEED TO GO BE BY MYSELF RIGHT NOW! and she’ll do just that.  I guess she’s had a lot of practice, since she seems to have been perpetually angry for the past six months.  I’m sure that’s not accurate, but it feels that way.  I guess this is part of what being three years old is all about.

Since we’ve been struggling with the potty we’ve been having more conflicts, and I’ve gotten back into a bad habit of nagging her to use the potty.  I mean, I know when she needs to go.  It’s perfectly obvious.  And once the accidents started I tried to head them off by reminding her to go.  The other day we went out for a walk and after 5 minutes she just stopped and stood still and wouldn’t move.  She was holding in an impending bowel movement.  I asked if she needed to use the potty and she said, NO, which she says every time.  I got frustrated and said we needed to go home and she threw a fit.  I had to threaten to carry her home and abandon her scooter before she would walk with me, and even then, it was a rough walk home.

Later that afternoon, when we were just snuggling on the sofa and I had totally forgotten the incident, she said to me (and I got this down verbatim):

I’M NOT FEELING VERY HAPPY RIGHT NOW.

“Why not?”

YOU KEEP TELLING ME TO GO TO THE POTTY AND THAT MAKES ME ANGRY.

She said it calmly and with such assurance.  It was like I was talking to an adult!  God, that girl is amazing!  I immediately apologized for nagging her all the time, and I told her that I would stop.  She agreed to try harder to use the potty.  (It’s too early to know if there will be any positive results, but I do know that she was entirely right in her complaint.)

Despite all of the good, this is the first period where I can’t say that this parenting thing just keeps getting better and better.  It’s been a rough six months.  Most of it is just the nature of her age, but also, I can see aspects of Sam’s personality that I don’t particularly like.  She’s a hot-head like her mom and dad, and she converts all negative emotions into anger.  I can’t force her to change, but have to somehow help her see, in an age-appropriate way, how she can better identify those emotions and then think about how to solve the problem.  I think she is doing extremely well for her age, but I do get tired of being yelled at all day.  And, of course, overall, I find her developing personality fascinating and wonderful.  I wonder what she’ll be like in six more months.