Every parent has stresses and many have more than we have, so it is not a complaint but an observation that juggling parenting with work, work travel, selling a house, dealing with finances, worrying about almost everything is very taxing on health, life, and relationships and it is taking the time to appreciate the little things, working on your relationships, and being present in the moment positively that gets you through the days.
When you are young parents you think that each year is the best and your favorite, and while there are arguments for each phase, advice that we received that yes, this is a great age, but every age is too (until teenage years I am sure, but the people giving advice did not have teenage children yet). Elia is in a remarkably cute phase, yes every phase seems to be cute, but you will have to bear with happy parents writing. She has been becoming more aware of her humor and her language, that what she says really makes people react and others, she says things that she doesn’t realize are amazing.
Once when we were getting ready for bed and one of us said “Elia, I love you.” Elia’s response was, “I know, I love Curie.” Her language development is coming along well, but she still says “t” for “c” and so it comes out “Turie.” She and Curie are also is really into “assage” meaning “massage” and they will proceed to rub your back. She is also processing words “duck, duckling, dog, dogling” in an adorable way.
Both kids sing a lot, either making up songs (Elia’s “my heart can sing and I will remember”), singing the ones they learned in school, or the classics, but as of late it has been Moana and Beauty and the Beast (the live movie edition). For Moana, Elia’s favorite song is “Away, away,” but she loves singing “Your Welcome even more. The best is when she sings “adowable,” and “the BOD!” If you know the song, you know what I mean. She also decided to no longer be scared of the crab song saying, “I brave,” even when, or because, Curie still doesn’t like it.
The kids have seen Beauty and the Beast three times in the theater now and we will buy it when it comes out. Elia was so proud that she was now brave to watch it. She knows most of the words and will sing it by herself, sing when we are singing it, and ask us to sing it. The most recent time we went the kids sang to the movie which was as entertaining for their aunt Julie as it was for them (Curie kept explaining plot points). Elia loves the song “Belle” but for her it is “Bonjour,” “you play Bonjour?” “No, I want Bonjour!” but the best is when we play it. She is obsessed with her Belle dress and insists on taking the part of Belle “no, no, I Belle, you be the bonjour.” “The bonjour,” we love it.
She wants to play Belle when we sing and wants Albert to be the Beast “you my Beast” and either Curie or Erin to be the prince (yes two roles). But the other character she wants to be is LeFou, which she pronounces “M’Fou” (in Elia’s Maui voice, “its adowable), and wants you to be Gaston. So she loves “Bonjour,” “our favorite song (Gaston)” but most recently she asks for “kill the Beast” over “Tale as Old as Time” or the one where Belle and Beast discover Stockholm syndrome…rather when they start feeling something for each other. She also likes the new song that Beast sings. So as much as we resisted the princess for Curie (who laments that she wants to be Belle sometimes), it is really cute when Elia says “you put on my Belle dress?
A couple of other things, Elia loved being on the boat and took control of the motor at one point when we went to Burke Lake. She was fearless about playing with crawfish (she was wearing her Belle dress at first and told Erin that “I the Belle crawfisher” when we had live crawfish at home, became very proud of peeling crawfish and now loves to eat them, a relief because she was the hold out on loving crawfish for a while.
It turns out the Tinkerbell movie and sequels are really good, yes, yes, we were those parents that didn’t want the kids obsessed, but it wasn’t until the kids learned the “everyone who smiles is pretty, and beauty is in your actions and comes from within” lesson that we have relented (given in, caved, and capitulated). We still are opposed to the broad commercialization of it all though.
Final cute thing, when Curie was younger and whining we would tell her she has to use a strong voice or a nice voice. That didn’t really work (parents could probably have told us), so we asked her instead to use a robot voice, which she thought was hilarious and took her out of her unhappiness to say things in that voice. Well, the other day we asked the same of Elia, where she had a moment of internal conflict where you could see her not wanting to do it but really wanting the thing she wanted. Here is how we knew, and it is adorable (yes you are thinking Elia in Maui’s voice), Elia can’t do the robot voice without using her hands too in a robot way, so she was starting the hand motion even before she could articulate anything, much less in the robot voice. Someone said that she is a method actor.
Two final things, during prayers she said “I thankful for the sun,” which is subtly pretty sophisticated, and something of a favorite, “I am a little bit small and a little bit tall” to explain that she is still little even though she wants to be tall. It is wonderful being a parent even if life feels hard. More later, take care.