So the girl is now 40 months old! Three and 1/3 years old. This month has totally flown by and it’s definitely been a crazy one! For one thing, we had our first October snowstorm during our last work trip out to New Jersey until after the new baby arrives. It was a fun time, and everyone was so kind to us out there, friends, co-workers, the hotel staff that has become like family to us. We will miss everyone until we get to go back on the road, the traveling troupe + Adik by then :-). But that won’t be for quite a few months, and we’re definitely looking forward to being home for the next few months straight. It will be different, and certainly new for all of us. Yaya has been part of the traveling troupe now since she was 13 months old, and I hope she won’t get cabin fever from not being hauled around for a while.
[[image:2011-alya40months2.jpg:Excited about staying home for a while?:center:0]]
Food status: she has been eating mangos every so often. Nothing else has changed though. Still a toastivore.
Potty training status: she is even taking naps during the daytime diaper-free. There have been a few wet incidents during nap time, but other than that, it’s all wonderful. She has even roused herself from naps a few times to go potty (it makes her terribly cranky though). 🙂
Nap status: she seems to have gone back to napping daily. Last month’s almost giving up nap seems to have given way back to normal 1-2 hour daily naps, for the most part. I guess we’ll see these kinds of phases as she keeps getting older and changing and developing.
Big sister transition: Yaya is definitely very bossy and will probably dictate what her (poor) Adik will have to do, reminiscent of what Hisham was to me ;-). She never calls herself the baby anymore, and corrects us if we do it. “I’m not the baby, I’m the big sister.” All the roles that we play have been changed around and reassigned to include Adik as the baby and Yaya as the big sister. She has even designated Kiki the Koala, one of her favorite toys, one of the toys that she had been sleeping with every night, to now be Adik’s toy and every night when I tuck her in to bed, she hands Kiki to me for Adik to sleep with while she curls up with Purrsley. This is of course, endlessly touching and more than we could have hoped for, really. I hope this does mean that she will be an active participant in the raising of her little brother. She also has this vision that she will be pulling her Adik around in a wagon? I am not sure where she got this idea from, but perhaps next summer it can be a reality for her.
It is amazing to see what a real little person she has become. She has opinions and ideas, and expresses them quite eloquently at times. Vin and I have caught her using sentences with the word “actually” (correctly!), which of course makes us laugh. She can count to 40 in English, and is learning to count to 20 (from 14) in Malay and Spanish. Yaya has taken to the iPod, where she loves her Spelling Bug program – she can spell quite a few words now and recognize the words when she sees them in a book. She also likes to quiz us to make sure we know how to spell things or what letter starts a word. She does seem to like letters and numbers and making words with them. It’s just amazing when you think that she has only been speaking for a little over a year now! 🙂
She enjoys playing pretend – her imagination is quite active. We pretend all kinds of things are toys or animals, and she makes scenarios and stories out of everything. She asks a lot of questions and seems to have an incredible memory for all kinds of trivia. She’s constantly pulling out little factoids that we may have told her about months and months ago that we’ve completely forgotten about. Amazingly, she has allowed us to put a new pair of barrettes in her hair! Notice the red ones in the pictures? Wheeeee!! Have we weaned her off of her two barrettes that she has worn non-stop for the past two years? We will see!
It definitely is such a cliche, but we do keep falling more in love with our beautiful little girl. She’s no longer a baby, and at 40 months, she is definitely quite the handful! But we love the journey we’ve been on with her so far and cannot wait to see what wonderful things she will get to do in her life, and hopefully be there to support her in all her endeavors. She has one more month or so left of being an only child, and we’ll see how she actually transitions into her new role as big sister (“kak”).
Happy birthday baby girl! You may not be a baby any more but you will always be our baby! We love you!
[[image:2011-alya40months1.jpg:Lying in a pile of autumn leaves:center:0]]
