The Girl Loves Flour

Maybe teaching her how to sift wasn't such a great idea. What I first thought was simply a desire to feel and taste, and therefore truly experience the flour she sifted has turned into an obsession.

Making pie shells will apparently never be the same. Not only does she get to sift the flour to mix up the dough, but then *gasp* Mommy sprinkles MORE flour all over the counter! Is there anything better?

I have to be quick in my rolling so I can keep greedy fingers away from the pie crust. As I roll, they are quickly stealing the flour from the edges that are pushed further toward her. Once the pie shell has been liberated from the counter, it's a free-for-all. She's like a whirling dervish. I place the crust in the pie shell and fill it, turn around and there is not a speck of flour left on the counter. Instead, there is a very happy little girl, her face, hands and clothes telling the story of where it all went.

But she knows the routine - and has also developed a dislike for dirty, sticky hands, so she steps off her stepstool, picks it up and takes it to the bathroom sink where she turns on the water and washes her hands. It's up to Mommy to dust her clothes with the towel, though.

With Thanksgiving she has had lots of flour opportunities - two pies baked Wednesday (pecan and pumpkin), then a double crusted pie on Wednesday (apple) and today I made turkey pot pie for dinner.

I can't imagine liking flour the way she does, and hopefully it will do her no harm. In the meantime, she sure does enjoy it!

And she still loves pumpkin pie. This afternoon she declared she "needed pumpkin pie". So I gave her a piece and she had no trouble finishing it all by herself. Not that I thought she would - she helped herself to the rest of my piece Thursday when I left the table to get something.

So Spelling Isn't Going to Work

Earlier today I told her daddy that we should pick up some P-O-O-H stickers while we were doing our errands. She came running up and said, "You're going to get me some more Pooh stickers, Mommy?"

She is really interested in writing and drawing lately. She can write Amelia, Mommy, Daddy and Nana. Her D's need a little me work because she starts from the bottom and makes them in one stroke, so they come out looking like ovals. When writing her name she loves using a lower case "e" and once I showed her how to dot an "i" there was no going back to capitals on that letter, either. She is creative and will do each letter of her name in a different color sometimes - whether she is using crayons or outside drawing with chalk on the driveway.

The little faces she draws are adorable. (Don't all of us moms say that, though?) Her mouths are straight lines, there are eyebrows, sometimes ears, and they all have individual little hairs that stick up crew-cut style, and they all must have feet. No bodies, though.

I have saved several pages where she has written names and drawn faces. So precious!

She NEEDS chocolate.

We went to CVS to browse around a little and see what they had in stock for Christmas. We found a cute photo album with a big ladybug on front and Amelia wanted to look at it while we wheeled around. By the time she was done with it, I was ready to go so I told her we would put it back, but she didn't think that was a good idea. I went down the photo album aisle and as I stopped in front of the place where it belonged I told her it needed to stay there and that she could have a piece of the chocolate I was buying. (Ghirardelli peanut butter and chocolate squares, on sale!) She reluctantly agreed and we proceeded to the check-out. The girl rang us up and as I was paying Amelia starts, in a pleading (not exactly whining) tone, "I neeeeed chocolate. Mommy, I neeeeeeeed chocolate!" I said to the clerk, "Hmmm, she needs chocolate?" My, my, she's only 3 - what will it be like by the time she's 12?

Little Red Caboose

Amelia adores The Little Red Caboose and lately, whenever she concludes a phone conversation (with me, Grandma, Nana, Daddy, whomever), she will say, "Bye-bye!" And then, "The Little Red Caboose ALWAYS came last." She seems to think that is a natural part of ending a phone conversation.

Updated 11/17: She saw this posting and said "The Little Red Caboose! It's awesome!!" Yep, she uses '80's vernacular!

5:22

a.m. is when Amelia walked into our room and read the digital clock to us Monday morning.

This morning it was 5:42 a.m.

On the other end of the day, it's all I can do to keep her up until 7 pm. Immediately after supper each night she demands her milk and wants to go to bed.

Hopefully tomorrow morning will give us another 20 minutes and we'll be back to her "normal" 6 am. The extra time would be especially nice since we're glued to the TV and computer tonight watching returns and projections even though they mean nothing until it's all over as far as I am concerned. 2000 certainly taught me that.

Bad mommy moment - I took Amelia to dance last night only to discover the hard way that apparently the last week for this term was last Monday night. Yep, we were the only toddler-mommy pair there. I don't know why I thought they lasted until the holidays - maybe it was the cost? Anyway ... Amelia got to run around the room and roll on the mats for a while, and Ms. Angel even gave her some stamps on her hand, which was nice. Amelia was not ready to leave, and not afraid to let me know it, until I reminded her that there were ROCKS! outside.

We voted today after a bit of a problem getting there. The entrance to the school was blocked due to road construction and traffic was backed up going in and waiting to come out, so I turned around and went to the other side of the school. Amelia had a ball helping me press the buttons to light up the candidates. The paper on the side went a little nuts each time one was changed, but oh well. I did have to carefully review the ballot before submitting it to make sure Amelia didn't help me vote for someone I didn't intend to choose.

Emotions

You know Amelia has excelled at the exercises at preschool where she has to read emotions based on drawn faces when she sees our latest Time magazine last night and says: "They're mad and sad." (Keep in mind, she "reads" right to left like an Arab most of the time.)

She saw it again last night and said, "John McCain is mad," in her very sympathetic tone that she uses when people are upset (or even if she just thinks they're upset). It sounded so darn funny, we couldn't help but laugh.