At night, Erin has the kids say prayers in what they were thankful for in the day. Curie ultimately has been saying she is thankful for “boo boo butt” which Elia likes to copy, but Elia likes to start with either family or each of us. Elia has us go in order in the bed, usually starting with Erin, then Curie, then herself, then Albert. While the rest of us say what we are grateful for, Elia substitutes “grateful” with “thank you” as in “I thank you for Mommy and Daddy, and Turie.”
In addition to pronouncing her hard C’s as T’s, she had been saying “yook,” instead of “look” and copying Curie with “lellow” instead of “yellow,” but the othe day, “Yook” became “look” for a little while.
She is getting precocious. The other day, Erin was saying to Albert that Elia doesn’t miss a thing. Elia who happened to be walking by said “Nope!” without even turning her head our direction. A part of this is that she is in her “terrible three’s” testing her boundaries, crying when she doesn’t get what she wants, and asserting herself around possesion of toys to establish her identity, especially wanting what Curie has. She asks for what Curie has in a nice way though, “please I have that?”
While Curie is less about the princess thing now, Elia is fully immersed. She has an Elsa dress, a Belle tutu, and a Batgirl costume that she loves to wear. Lately it has been the Elsa dress, though after seeing Beauty and the Beast in the theater (the girls wore “cosplay” in that they wore Belle print dresses), she does like both Belle and Elsa. “You get my Elsa dress?” “You sing ‘Let it go,” I dance?” “you my prince” and very cute, she said to Curie “You wear Elsa dress too so we match?” She loves to have things match, it is her taking after the “connection” activity that Curie brought home from kindergarten – whenever you have something in common, you say “connection!” Elia likes us to match, “you underwear match my dress!” or if you are eating or drinking the same thing or from the same glasses “we match!” The other day she actually said “connection!”
Her language gets better and while she repeats words a bit when she is talking faster than she is processing, she is pretty sophistcated in what she says. Then there are funny things like when it was windy “Uppy! I blowing away!” or telling us who she loves and family members she is scared of. And her friends, she loves her friends both from her old school at Skyline and her new one at Rosslyn. “Eva funny, Sophia funny, Robbie funny, I love them.” Robbie is Elia’s Navi, “I love Robbie, he my friend.” When we went to Flight she asked specifically to invite him.
Life continues to throw us curve balls, but we keep coming back to family. Albert has been saying the kids are a saving grace in the face of hardship. Erin has commented on the smiles they bring even when things seem hard. We are grateful, even when we are knocked down, we have our family and we truly appreciate that.