When drinking her lemonade, Erin overheard Curie say quietly, “I’m going to drink my potion now.”
It is a relief to hear such things in a day and age of screen time and unscheduled programming, even if it did seem a little sinister. Just the fact that she is using her imagination is a relief and a breath of fresh air. These days Legos are kits rather than conduits for imagination, but it is imagination that we want for our kids.
Curie loves the wicked queen from Snow White (no she has not seen the movie, but YouTube has told her who she is), but only because she has a pretty crown, so it was a bit of a surprise that she was muttering to herself about potions.
February was a gone in a blink of an eye; with Albert’s new job, planning a move, and the family getting sick a few times, it has been a blur. Curie was sick three times, Elia two, Albert three, and Erin once. While staying at home sick, Curie has begun a campaign of telling us that she has not had enough time with one of us: “Mommy, I didn’t get enough time with you,” “Daddy, we were supposed to play together.” It is not all learning new manipulation however, while she was sick, she spent most of it watching TV on Albert’s chest something both of them said was the best place ever. She will randomly tell us she loves us, “I love you mommy,” to get our attention and more explicitly told Albert that she “did a good job too,” after Albert had praised Elia for something. The crazy thing is that she is the precocious one that does so many amazing things; she has nothing to be jealous of except for our attention. We just have to be careful not to become the “Asian parents,” and take it for granted that she is supposed to be smart and amazing.
We find it amazing that she has named the Playdoh extruder, “the Construder,” and has her dolls and ponies be big and little sisters and parents as she makes dresses and food for them with her Playdoh. She pretends she is on video just like the “eggs” she watches on YouTube. And even though she is immersed in her princess dolls, she still wants Albert to build train tracks to play trains and towers from blocks for her figures to live in. She is very interested in how things work and wants to fix things when they break. So princess, doctor, warrior, engineer, it is a balance, as apparently all things are.
When our kids are sick we relent on many things, perhaps a failing of ours (we say ours, but perhaps we should say Albert’s), but somethings are a pleasant surprise. We had banned most princess things, including Sofia the First, but upon actually watching an episode, it was very good in its message as long as you got to the end of an episode; it goes to show that many things that you believe to be sacrosanct are not so much when you look into them closer. But on the topic of Sophia, the other day Curie took a line from a Sofia song and made up her own words and sang it all day. it was pretty cool. It went like this
“You know you have to do your part
And get into the groove
Or you can’t sing and dance
And get into the moves”
Curie is getting used to the idea of moving. At first she was against it and cried when we told her, but she later asked if she could bring her toys which made it better. When she found out that we could bring all of our stuff, she was okay with it. The new house has pink curtains in one room which is now Curie and Elia’s room.
Curie continues to learn her boundaries and test them. She loves asking Elia for kisses and cries when Elia won’t sleep next to her. Recently because of an outbreak of pink-eye, Curie has begun sleeping in her own little bed (with the Thomas the Tank Engine tent on it). We even moved the elliptical to the guest room so that her bed could be next to ours. She keeps inexorably growing up, as kids are wont to do but we are reminded often that she is still a four year old. Just the other day she said “but I can’t go to sleep, because the fun is still in me!”