Halloween for Elia began with wanting to be a chef Belle for her costume long before Halloween, she has either long term memories or great memories of pictures of us in catering clothing with her as a chef, that she associates Halloween with being a chef. However, when she saw Curie’s Wonder Woman costume, and Erin’s fascination for Wonder Woman after the movie, she also wanted to be Wonder Woman; and because the costume we got Curie was too small, we had two Wonder Women. Elia wore her costume for the school parade and had a great time playing with her sword and shield, and posing in her costume at home. On Halloween though, she wanted to be Belle, and so she was Belle for Halloween.
At the Hoagland Halloween party, Elia started the day willing to be a judge and was game as any of us, but once at the party, she got scared of the decorations and the costumes and asked Albert to take her to the car to wait. Both interesting and adorable, we left by 7:30.
Elia has been watching Phineas and Ferb with Curie and has been singing the songs in the car with Albert when they play the CD in the purple car. Albert and Elia have gotten a fair amount of “its just us again” time together and the purple car remains a preferred car for Elia. There are times where her being a three-almost-four-year-old means that she acts up which results in frustration on our part. Sometimes though we get a moment of clarity and realize that we need to be more patient than the day sometimes allows which results in the “flower at the end of the bed” lesson we wrote about earlier.
Elia has always been a good eater and has been growing a lot. She is at Curie’s mouth now rather than at her chin. This, of course, encourages us to beg Curie to eat more dairy and protein. Elia has grown so much that she is tall enough to go into the IKEA playroom (three feet). She didn’t have as good an experience as Curie though because the second time we went, she chose to stay with us.
In recent weeks, Elia has been transitioning from just her yellow Belle dress to her Moana dress, then to red dresses. We found out that her friend Agnes and her love to twirl and as a result she has been asking for dresses that spread out when she twirls. She has been into red dresses because they had to wear red one day at spirit week and it made an impression on her. Perhaps the teachers or kids liked her in the red dress. She has also been interested in very long dresses, or rather Curie’s dresses. Curie is outgrowing some fancy dresses that Elia is very fascinated to wear.
Elia’s favorite colors these days are yellow, brown, black, purple, but they do change like, yellow, blue, pink, white, or yellow, orange, red, and all of the colors in the rainbow. In general, when we ask if she likes one thing or another, she generally says both. She learns so well at school telling us about the “awful tower” which was the Eiffel Tower, and once drew a planet and told Albert it was the Chinese planet. She loves to read and be read to, this is largely a part of being with her parents and because Curie is learning to read. She loves to make up songs singing very sophisticated lyrics including soulful ones like “nobody’s proud of me (we were just asking each other what the lyric was and Erin said “nobody’s proud of me” to which Elia responded “I am!” LOL).”
Elia is very talkative these days even if she still uses “t” for “c” and “t” for “k.” She can say “cookie” when prompted, but says “tookie” when she is just speaking. At the same time her she is very sophisticated with her thought processes. She was once dotting a picture of an animal with green dots all over it, we were looking at her draw and she said to us, “these are chicken pox.” She remembers where things are weeks after putting them, once telling us that her Beauty and Beast book was in the coloring books when we were looking for it. The funniest thing recently though was when Elia and Albert were driving together and quietly he hear her say “wa ha ha ha.” After a while she said it again “wa ha ha ha,” and when Albert asked her what she was saying, she said that is what bad guys say. He looked in the rear view mirror and she was steepling her hands and saying “wa ha ha ha.” We should be very afraid perhaps.