Curie October 2014. Albert is in Brussels for a meeting, and Erin’s parents are coming up to help while he is gone (missing both Halloween and our Anniversary). Albert travels with one of the (now three) Jellycat bunnies that the girls has; this was the first time Curie realized this and she said “you can take Hoppa with you on your trip,” much to Albert’s relief.
This month, Curie got her first “hair cut” when Natalie, one of her friends and her were playing “hair cutter,” and Natalie actually cut a bit off of Curie’s hair, you could tell when it happened and you can kind of see it in the fourth picture on the back of her head.
We related when we all kicked-our-legs-like-the cow-in-bed-story earlier in a separate post, but something else that Curie has taken to want to do recently is to take family pictures with the timer. So a couple of times now she has asked for a family photo where she will tell us if we are blurry or if someone blinked so that we have to take it again. It is very sweet.
We say often that Curie is crazy smart, and this month she proved it again when she wanted to watch something on the phone. We try to distract her with car games, of which one is a bit of a scavenger hunt in the car. We ask her “what do we need to find today?” And she gives us a list. When we find them, she awards us points a la “Whose line is it anyway?” where the points don’t matter. So we said, why don’t we play a game? You can watch afterward (the game can take a long time), so she rattles off a list that is a little odd “dentist office, trees, dirt, a car (usually it is a taxi, a fire engine, a police car, a bus, and a train or similar). She then proceeds to find each of them in successive order totally playing us. She had picked what she could see from the car so that she could fast forward the game and watch something (wait, have we relayed this story already? We may have).
Albert wound up a year-long project of moving the company headquarters this month, and brought the family to see it. In the past she has been a little afraid because of the construction, and has not bonded with Michael, Albert’s boss, because there was no where to run around. This time however was different, after being a little shy, she bonded with Michael over wrapping bubbles and after returning home she said she wanted to go back “because I love it.” and said she wanted to go back to Michael’s office. On a separate note, because of the building there was a Gala to raise money for needs-based scholarships. It was the first time we went to a business thing and had the kids with a “sitter,” in this case Erin’s sister Julie. Curie had a great time, but when we came back she said “don’t go to a party again!”
Considering how into trains Curie is, it is hard to believe it has only been a year since we went to Strasburg and she rode the train for the first time. Until then she had not developed an interest in trains. Earlier in the month we rode a small train at a local park and she was a little scared because of how fast it went. She wanted to go to the “train station” which refers to Strasburg and ride the big train, so we went up and rode the train, and bought Caitlin, a new engine to take home, and stayed over to go again (last year we had only planned to go one day and Curie asked to go a second so we stayed over). But the next day, she said to us that she wanted to go home to play with her trains at home. She wanted to play with Caitlin on her tracks instead of going back to ride. Albert found it amazing that she wanted to play together at home instead of doing the big “fun” thing. It was her call, so we went home instead.
This month she has taken to playing with her twin Curious Georges named Alice and John as twins, jumping crazy high off the couch, and going to the Halloween party that we wrote about earlier (this is being written before Halloween, so we will probably post that separately). She has become a little more needy recently, especially with the time away at the Gala (Albert remembers the first time they had a baby sitter too), and wants “mommy only, not Elia,” at times. Other times she wants to hold Elia and kisses her spontaneously. When Curie wakes, Elia often makes her smile (and she surely makes Elia smile). Albert often crashes on the couch after needing some downtime as an introvert, but recently Curie has been waking crying for “daddy to sleep next to us (and yes, contrary to what we thought we would do, we did end up with the family bed).” She is sensitive, and smart, considerate and precocious, needy and loving, and everything you would think of in a three-year old. It is not always easy, but it feels more alive to be a parent than it did when it was just the two of us, and really gives us insight on how we see how our parents see us too.