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.

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.

The Sims

The little girl's been playing The Sims on her iPad since a few months after she turned 2, and is still at it several months later. I was a bit dubious about introducing her to it, but I'm pretty sure now I chose well. I picked the Sims because it's just a dollhouse game, and well, she has a dollhouse, so why not? There's no danger or skills required or violence or anything really out her understanding. And it's turned out to be helpful in some ways.

For starters, her ability to interact with the UI is as good as anyone's. There's an in-game task of catching ghosts where she has to tap on a randomly moving ghost. She gets it pretty often.

When she first started playing she'd sometimes start hunting for ghosts in our house. It was cute. She'd walks around with a stick or some kind, pointing in random directions, saying I'm hunting ghosts. Occasionally I'd hold up a toy or something and say It's a ghost! quick! tap it and she'd tap it with her finger repeatedly until she declared Yey! I got it

Anyway, back on topic. You can make the people in the game do things like eat, go the loo, etc. We've instilled in her that the people must must must wash their hands after going to the loo. If one of them walks away before washing their hands we make a very big deal of it oh no! He's got to wash his hands. Get him back. To the point that not only will we occasionally hear her yell at the box no! Wash your hands!, but she's usually very clear that she needs to wash her hands after using the loo.

Same thing with pets. When a person plays with a dog or cat I tell her they need to wash their hands. If the girl touches me after touching an animal, I'm allergic enough it will really do me in. So having a place for her to practice it is helpful.

She did point out recently that they have toothbrushes on their sinks, and was very confused when I told her she couldn't make them brush their teeth.

The sims can be dressed in many outfits. I advise her on what outfits work and what looks terrible. More a case of me instilling my tastes on her, I know. But at least we talk about what she likes vs what I like. And in a place where the people wearing those clothes won't be offended by our fashion policing.

I do have to turn the sound off whenever she plays. The music is a little grating after a while, but the main reason is the sims speak a made up language that sounds like English. This I found, to my horror, was interfering with her learning to talk. When she started playing she was only just starting to beat words into sentences. When I found her randomly peppering her speech with sim-words, I immediately went into the settings and turned off taking forever. As complaints against the game goes, it's pretty minor, considering the designers didn't have the impact on learning to speak in mind when they added the fake words.

We do get into arguments about some things. She has to go to work. No she doesn't. No really the game said it was time. No. She has to take a bath now! This never ends well. You see, the game has quests and other things you need to do to keep the fake little people alive and happy. But the girl can't read so she thinks all these things I say we need to do after there's a popup are just my whimsey.

She also likes to buy things using the in-game money ("simoleons"). Sometimes I'd be saving up to buy some rather expensive things like a cat or house. You see, after she goes to sleep, I set the sims on the tasks of making simoleons or "life points". Which takes a while, but it means we can do more fun things when she next plays the game. But, not infrequently, she'll, when my back is turned for a few seconds, spend some huge amount it took me weeks to acquire. Often on something meaningless like a chair.

That leads to arguments.

Sometimes L has to intervene and take the game away from both of us. Until we can show we can play nicely together.

I think these cases are more learning points for me. Get me used to how she treats limited resources and how to convince her to use them wisely. Or at least to understand what is a frivolous purchase and what would actually make her happy to have.

We're not there yet

All in all, the game seems to be doing her some good. Kind of like an interactive What Do People Do all Day but without the anthropomorphisation. I'd recommend it if you have a non-fragile device you feel safe leaving your kid alone with.

Upgraded girl

The girl came back from her time away not quite a completely new girl. But she's certainly much more chatty. When we left, she had a few words, but was gaining about 5 new words a day. When we stayed with L's cousin he spent a while showing her various youtube videos of cats. She combined her first two words for him when she later pointed at his computer from the hallway and said Watch cats.

That was just the start of it. Now that she's back, she'll at least try to repeat back any word you say to her. At least a couple of syllables of it. She's started on the alphabet and numbers, though she really only remembers a few of them at this point (5 and Q seem to be her favourites, though G and 6 are a close second).

Taking her to the loo is much easier, since she tells us when she needs to go. And she's only missed a few times in the past month. The downside is she's learned that if she tells us she needs to go, we'll stop what we're doing (often driving on the motorway) and take her to the loo. It seems 3 times out of 4 she just wants a change of scenery. This meant a 6 hour drive up north took over 8 hours, with us stopping every 15 minutes at one point.

We went to a music festival a in April. One of the bands had a little girl a couple of months younger, but about as developed verbally. While they were doing their sound check, the two girls played with each other. It was the cutest thing. Their girl kept shyly handing mine a stuffed tiger, which mine would play with and hand back. This was a really weird experience for me, since I've been a big fan of this band since I was a teenager listening to them on the radio on my way to school. And here I was giving them tips on ear defenders while our children played together.

They then had a little game. Their girl was wearing a shirt with cats all over it. So my girl would poke her on a cat and say cat, and the other girl would poke back and say shirt. This went back and forth for ages. Until my girl got a little pushy with her poking, and knocked the other girl over, making her cry.

I'm at least consoled by the fact that my girl expressed concern when the other girl was upset. Part concern and part confusion. I'm not sure she entirely made the connection that her rough playing caused the problem. It's something I really need to watch out for. She does sometimes slap or hit us with things – which we're very stern about telling her off for doing. But it's much worse when she does it to another, younger, baby – which rarely happens, but mostly through lack of opportunity than anything else. I'm trying to find ways to get her to, if not actually have empathy, at least behave as if she does.

Now we play

Last week I took the girl to a playgroup at the local leisure centre. L had taken her there once before, and this was my turn to take the girl for a bit of early morning public play before heading off to work.

The wee one is still partly on east coast time, so I had to wake her before getting out of the house. I suspect that's why she didn't really seemed to enjoy herself. She spent almost the whole time staring at the other children. Very little excited her. She'd grudgingly accept walking around, playing with balls, or attempting to share with other kids. For the most part she'd just sit and take in the environment.

The play time is about 45 minute long and is for up to 15 age 5 and unders. I think there were about a dozen kinds, mostly between 1 and 2. It was free play on soft platforms and shapes or in a ball pit. Followed by about 10 minutes of singing. Mostly songs I did not know. Or songs I couldn't do the hand motions to (There's a hand gesture for …washed the spider out…?).

I spent most of the time teaching the lass how to safely get off of platforms. She was doing quite well. Until she fell over while I was putting on my shoes at the end. Great. Always fun to be the incompetent parent who has to console his crying child for getting her hurt while he wasn't looking. At least my embarrassment was reduced since most people had left by then.

I was pleasantly surprised the thing wasn't as mothercentric as I was expecting. There were two other fathers there. There was nothing inherent in any of the play or facilities that precluded a father taking their child. The only problem was the mensroom with the changing table was locked and the normal mensroom was a changing room with showers – too wet and dirty to change the girl in. But there was a reasonable changing room upstairs that was clean and free. The only problem was it had no toilet, so I could not EC the girl.

Note to all restroom designers. Always put a toilet in the room with the changing table. It's good to have a clean place to put the baby to reclothe them after they go to the loo.

I'll likely go again. At least a few more times and see if the girl actually takes a liking toward it. I'm sure she'd have fun if she were more awake for it. We'll just have to wait and see.

Yesterday I took the girl to the local park. After her accident the other day, I was very conservative on the play. Don't play there, you'll get sand in your wound, We can't play on that, you might hit your head and reopen your wound. She did enjoy the swing and the seesaw. Though on the seesaw, I was holding on to one leg the whole time. I was no fun at all. I'm hoping the paranoia ends soon.