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.

The sparkle in your eyes keeps me alive

It's kind of weird how songs take on a completely different meaning once you have children. You'll just never hear them the same again, and after a while you'll start to question if you ever actually knew what the song was all about. Is it a love song, or just swooning over an infant? Is it about dancing, sex or just playing in a bouncy castle? At this point I can't hear the lyric baby in a song without picturing it being sung to a toddler.

I pick up my daughter at nursery pretty much the same way each time. It's just after lunch. I come in the room and see her playing. Eventually she looks up at me and her eyes just shine and she smiles. And to this day the lyrics the sparkle in your eyes keeps me alive have taken on a completely different meaning. It’s shocking how much peace and solace your child can give you. Turns out that kiss-it-all-better works both ways.

Anyway, not to belabour the point, here's a smattering of lyrics and I can no longer hear without thinking about my child:

You think you're tired now, but wait until three

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed Is here in my arms

Destroy everything you touch today, destroy me this way

Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got blue eyes, oh you've got grey eyes. And I've never met anyone quite like you before.

Grabbing hands grab all they can all for themselves after all

And that's just off the top of my head. I could probably list dozens of these here.

3 is a magic number

Within moments of turning 3, her personality took a shift to the difficult. It's one of the reasons I've not posted here for ages. That and work sucking up every waking minute not spent with my daughter.

Anyway, to the topic at hand – she's not become malicious or evil or anything, it's just a number of things are now harder. Obstinate. That sums up much of it. She has enough mastery of language to explain what she wants but not enough to be able to be reasoned with.

The troublesome threes have begun.

Not everything is harder. I've gotten her to go to sleep something like 4 times in the past 3 months, which is a record for me.
Once she even fell asleep while I was reading to her. And this was a short picture book, not a 100+ page novel like last time.

That and today, a few minutes ago, which is how I have time to write this. She's been zombie-like all morning with her eyes little more than slits. I asked and she told me she wasn't a bit tired. Well, you're clearly not feeling quite right, so why not take a toy and have a wee lie down on the sofa? She took her slinkies and was asleep in 2 minutes.)

Other inconveniences are her wilful regressions. She can go to the loo by herself. But, when we're around she doesn't want to. Same with dinner. She can focus and eat a whole meal by herself, but she won't with us. It's like she's learned a skill, mastered it, and found it to be easier to not do it if someone else will do it for you. The only way I can think of solving this is to buy a new house with a different toilet and dining room.

And then she started nursery.

We're doing 3 days a week, 8am-1pm. Getting her up and out for 8am was a scary shift. For all of us. I've managed to get myself to bed by 3am most days since we started this, so that's a plus. But her sleep still hasn't got on track. She's mostly dropped her nap, and often misses her new earlier bed time, which means sleep deprivation might be cause of some of her 3-related personality shifts (she can join the club of overtired mood swings – I founded this local chapter).

Nursery has done a lot of good for her. She's hanging out with other children her age on a regular basis, and loves it. When she leaves nursery at the end of the day, it sometimes turns into hugs-for-everyone time.
It's like she's just discovered that there's this thing called "other people" and you can do things with them. On friday, on the way home from the park she just walked up to a couple at a bus stop, introduced herself and told them she was three. Every time we've been to a park for the past month she picked at least one smaller child, befriended them, and took them all over the playground Come, come, come, let's play!.

She also eats far better at nursery. It's the combination of someone besides us feeding her, her getting stuff we never cook at home, and them having a dedicated member of staff whose job it is to make a variety of foods for a shedload of picky babies and toddlers.

On the other hand, the grammar of some of the staff at nursery is horrendous. While I can find it hard to complain about having east-end accents in a Hackney day care, I'd at least expect better conjugation of "to be". The only think that consoles me is that the girl used "yourself" correctly in conversation the other day, so all must not be lost.