Three, a review

The girl is about to hit four so now's as good a time as any to go through the past year. Every child is different so none of this is likely to apply to anyone else. This is more of a general note since I've hardly blogged at all here this past year.

The biggest event was her starting nursery. She really liked all the books and toys and playing with other children. It made me feel less guilty the lack of arts and crafts I did with her at home. On the other hand... It's not the physical viruses that went around at nursery that were a problem, it was the memes. Princesses, fairies, Frozen, gender, bad grammar and cockney accents. I'm hoping once she starts real school the latter two will go away. But I suppose the rest will get worse over time.

The other affect of nursery was having to change her bedtime. Before she was in bed by 2130, but when she dropped her nap plus being at nursery at 8, meant moving bedtime back to 1930. Rather more traumatic since it meant dinner at 1730 or so. It was really hard at first to get dinner so early. It'd mean stopping work at the most productive time and figuring out what to make that she would eat. Which was always changing. Eventually we just had to give up eating together altogether and we'd just do child dinner and parent dinner 3 hours later. At least it meant us adults be able to eat food we liked again. And now the girl could eat fish fingers and sweetcorn.

A couple of weeks before she turned 3 she suddenly became insolent. It was a surprising personality shift where suddenly she'd be argumentative and refuse to listen or do things. Before that everything seemed so exciting to her. I suppose at 3 she realised what she didn't like and had the language to say so. She must have started to notice there were boundaries and that she could push them.

This was the part that drove me the most mad. This all happened before she started nursery so I can't blame this on other kids. I don't know why it started but I hope it ends with 4. Or at least changes to something more manageable. Otherwise I might end up with blog posts all a variation of Today we argued about something she'd never explain what. She'd just say Stop doing the thing I don't want you to do.

Three was also the year she stated asking for a brother and a sister. It's hard to explain to her that were perfectly happy as a trio. And impossible to say out loud that her behaviour is ensuring she'll be an only child. So instead she'll just pretend she's got invisible siblings around her when we go out and about.

The best parts of 3 were all the conversations. She's now eloquent enough to express what she's thinking and has come up with some really witty things. Pretend play was more exciting. We'd pretend to be at cafe (she even picked up the bill once). Or pretend we were fairies with magic wands transmuting things into other things. Or we'd build a Lego spaceship and take her toy animals into outer space and back. She's reconciled fantasy and science fiction in her head and is happy saying fairies are from fairy planet and aliens are from Jupiter.

Even playing Frozen was fun at first... until she literally didn't stop for 8 months. Now she just occasionally plays Rapunzel, but often conflates it with Star Wars. Well sometimes spar with inflatable Light Sabres and she'll say I cut off your head. But it's ok. I've replaced it with Rapunzel's

On that note we get to play Star Wars a lot. My parents gave her some of my old toys. It gives us something we both like to do together. She enjoyed it so much she wanted her 4th birthday party to have a space robots theme (she loved the R2-D2 cake)

She's still reserved in some ways but still rather outgoing at the same time. She's happy being on a stage (real or makeshift) and singing at the top of her lungs or telling a story. But she won't ask another child their name to start taking or playing with them. That said she does still find smaller kids on the playground and take them all over the place.

So that was 3. She'll be 4 in 2 days. I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like and how things will all change all over again. And I'll just try to keep up.