If you are looking for a well-behaved four-year-old, you likely are hoping against these characteristics.
Maya is like a little mini-tyrant these days. She snarls and growls. She spits and kicks and hits. She yells, "I don't like you anymore!" and "You are mean to me! You hurt my feelings!" when you try to save her from moving cars in a parking lot.
My mantra is, "I want to raise an independent, motivated, strong girl. These are traits to be celebrated."
Which is all well and good until you would rather shave your legs with tweezers than resolve yet another conflict.
This morning she went upstairs with me to get dressed. She wanted to do it herself. Fine. So what if she wears polka dot tights, a teal floral skirt, a white shirt with a colorful reindeer, a velvet half shirt and brown cloth boots to school?
In the process of exercising her independence, she put her tights on backwards so that the heel was facing forward on the fold in her foot. She howled. I offered to help. "I want to do it by my own!" she screamed. "GET AWAY!"
She cried some more. Skyler and Ella dared to enter the room where she was standing there half naked and she bellowed at them: "Get out! I don't want you in here when I'm getting dressed!" Then in the next breath, "Why am in here alone?! Why won't anyone help me?? I can't do this!"
I'm telling you.
After the dressing debacle I was searching on her head board for a toy of Ella's she had taken. I found it along with my favorite necklace and earrings and several hair pins. Last night I found a stack of stuff she is hiding behind the claw foot bath tub in the bathroom.
Maya also has mouth issues. As in her mouth needs constant stimulation, either by talking, contorting it into faces or putting things in it. She has taken a shine to gum chewing and asks for it every time she gets in the car. I have to try to reason with her (yeah, right) to ration the two pieces per day I have decided are reasonable so they aren't all gone by 10 am. When her gum runs out she cries from the back seat, "But my mouth is hungry!"
So are you getting this picture? We have a sneaky, self-willed, furious, 3 foot high hoarder with an oral fixation among us.
It's a good thing she is so damn cute, is entirely, ridiculously hilarious and just when she pushes you to the edge and you would willingly jump off, she wraps herself around you and says, "I just love you so much."
1 comment:
I sympathize! Mine's not quite so ornery yet, but I feel it coming as we move toward 4. When people tell me my children are cute, I reply that it's a good thing or I would probably eat them. Yea independence!
Post a Comment