It's official.

After some plotting and planning and time flying too quickly, it's official: I have a four and a half year old.


Hard to believe, isn't it? The months are sprinting by, the years are too and here is this marvelous child who dazzles me with statements like, "wait right here. I'm going to the bathroom, but if a monster comes in, just yell for me and I'll come kill him, okay?" (And she was disappointed to return and learn no monster had attacked, nor came to stay.) Or the child who is anxiously waiting for Halloween to come around again because she is expecting our deceased canine to crawl out of the ground in zombie form. She was just telling me yesterday that she will wear dresses again and I should buy them and maybe she'll wear them "someday...in like nine days." (For whatever reason, I don't believe her.) Oh, and she can't eat berries or anything with seeds in it because, "that would good for me and I don't like that." She's quite the artisan with her words too and if you couldn't tell, she has a vivid imagination.

Before we know it, she's going to be in Kindergarten driving her teacher crazy and asking or telling her about monsters and zombies and theme parks she's designing. She has been developing this theme park, a robot one and one of the rides is called "Monsters of Darkness." She's incredibly explicit with the details on the kind of ride it is and how you get to shoot monsters and what they look like. I think she's done such a wonderful job describing it, sometimes she thinks it's real and expects to truly visit it someday. Maybe she will. I'm certainly not going to stop her. (Nor could I.)

Every day is indeed a gift, even while I'm sorting through fifteen puzzles worth of pieces and matching them all to their owners. And even if I get tired of fighting with hot cocoa stains in Gymboree shirts (and I'm convinced that once an article of clothing from just that store gets something into its fibers, it will never, ever come out), I do thoroughly enjoying buying her clothes. (Regardless of the lack of wearing dresses.) I'm extremely lucky to have this life of mine, even the laundry, even the arguments over vegetables and kid's meal toys she doesn't agree I should get rid of.



Yeah, hard to believe I have a four and a half year old, but I'll gladly keep her, even if I thought I had a girl and kind of got a boy instead.