I usually do a lot of pictures in my posts, but I wanted to do something different and write down some of the funny things that Andrea says all the time, so here goes:

• “Oh my goodness!”
  She says this about all kinds of things, from the shocking to the mundane. Today it was, “Oh my goodness! I’m so sweaty!”
• “Apparently”
  Another commonly used (and misused) word. She says things like, “My dress is dirty, apparently.”
• “I’m afraid (that)…”
  This one cracks me up because it sounds so grown up, like she’ll say in a disappointed voice, “I’m afraid I’ll need my coat today.”
• “You know”
  Another hilarious one to hear from a 3 year old. She sounds like such a know-it-all when she says it. She’ll tell me thing like, “Some dinosaurs eat fish, you know.” She also says it when she’s sure I know something but I have no idea what she’s talking about, like, “My pink shirt with the butterfly. You know.” And if I dare say I don’t know what she’s referring to, she’ll say, “Yes, you do. You know, Mommy. The PINK shirt. With the butterfly. YOU KNOW.”
• “WHAT?!?”
  This is another that completely cracks me up. She has this incredulous way of saying, “WHAT?!?” whenever something is unusual or surprising. Like we saw one of those inflatable Christmas decorations the other day, and it was a Santa in a helicopter. I pointed it out and then heard from the back seat, “WHAT?!? Santa in a helicopter?!?” followed by hysterical laughter.

Another funny thing she says is at bedtime. I usually read her a book, then lay down and cuddle with her in her bed for a few minutes to make sure she gets settled. But she’s very independent, so after a minute or two, she’ll say, “When I say 10, you can leave.” Then she’ll count on her fingers, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Okay! You can leave now!” And she really wants me to get up and leave the room right that instant, or she just keeps repeating it over and over. “You can leave. I said you can leave. You can leave now, Mommy.”

She also has a lisp like thing going on when she says words that start with “fl-” like flower, floor, flip-flops. They come out sounding like sthlower, sthloor, and sthlip-sthlops. I love how cute it is, but I hope she grows out of it in the next year, so that we can avoid speech therapy. I think lisps are still pretty normal at this age though, so for now, I just enjoy it.

And she makes up words like crazy. I just asked her to say something silly and she immediately replied, “Pomma domma,” whatever that means. And if you ask her the name of her stuffed animals, she makes up crazy names on the spot every time. She’s holding a penguin now and I asked her his name and she said, “Pinga.” If there’s more than one animal, she’ll usually come up with a lot of made-up rhyming names, like “Schlomo, Domo, and Lomo.”

Another random funny I wanted to write down before I forget… She is super observant about everything, so one day, we were both wearing short-sleeved shirts and she said that our shirts were the same. I replied, “Yes, they both have short sleeves.” But she said, “No, not just short sleeves. They’re both FLAT sleeves.” I was completely confused by this, so I asked what she meant, and she said, “Some shirts have scrunched up sleeves, but this shirt has flat sleeves, like you.” After a little more discussion about what scrunched up sleeves meant, I realized she was referring to shirred cap sleeves like a lot of her shirts have, where they are gathered a bit at the shoulder (like this), versus sleeves on like a regular T-shirt or polo shirt that aren’t gathered (aka “scrunched up”). She reminded me about last night, when she brought it up again, because we all had on short-sleeves, but her sleeves were “scrunched up” and ours weren’t.

Speaking of wearing short-sleeves yesterday, it was AMAZING weather. A record-breaking 70 degrees on December 14th! And it’s even warmer today. We went to the playground after I picked her up from preschool and had such fun. She’s even starting to do the monkey bars without help (she made it a few rungs before she got nervous and wanted me to grab her), and was really brave about climbing up in the tower thing that she’s always been afraid of before. Here’s a picture of her on the slide. This was before we changed into short-sleeves, in the creative outfit she put together for school, because she had been begging to wear the pink skirt for a while.