Our “baby” is four years old today. Q commented the other night that she’s at her cutest age yet – her personality has emerged and she’s so fun to be around. I agree! She’s also:
-playful: Avery is constantly bouncing around the house acting goofy. When she’s not playing with her sister (their new favorite is to pretend Avery is the mama and Zoe is the baby), she’s doing things like jumping or climbing on her dad. She has developed some strong friendships at school (little girls named Naomi, Avery, and Margaret are her closest pals – and, on a funny note, she’s always talking about Margaret’s dad, who, at around 6’3″, is “super tall”).
-funny: She acts silly a lot – asking funny questions and running around saying in a funny voice things like, “Fancy-Nan-cay.” (Not sure where that came from!) She has also a new laugh where she puts her hands close to her face and giggles.
-sweet: She is very loving towards Zoe and to me and Q. She typically showers me with kisses and hugs at drop-off at school and (now) camp, and she’ll often tell me she’s going to love me forever and ever. In the car the other day, she surprised (and pleased) me by singing out of the blue a song I used to sing to her when she was smaller… “Mama – on a scale of one to ten, I love you one-hundred,” she sang.
-entertaining: She loves singing and dancing and often comes home performing things she’s learned at school. One of my favorite new songs is “Get Lucky,” and Avery has heard it so much that she’ll come up to me and start singing a lyric. Both she and Zoe love the song that came in my Father’s Day card to Q. (“I love you a bushel and a peck,” they’ve been singing non-stop since Sunday.) And she’s also a fan of local band Alphabet Rockers, who we recently saw in concert, and is often singing their songs.
-a copy-cat: She frequently mimics what her sister says and does – and she even uses some of my language. “That was a big yawners,” she said after yawning one day (sounding like me). And I had to laugh when she said to me recently about her dolls, “Sometimes I freak out because my babies are ad-doe-bull. They talk and are so ah-doe-bull.”
-mischievous: Avery isn’t always the best listener (she gets a fair amount of time outs!), and she has been known to taunt her sister (“I won, I won,” she’ll cry out in a certain tone during competitions to see who can get dressed the fastest) and get in the wrong carseat on purpose. (The girls both favor our purple one, and they’re supposed to trade off each car ride.)
-teenager-like: She has been known to yell out, “I KNOW that” in a teen-like tone when she’s frustrated with something that I say to her. And the other day, after I asked if she had played with her friend Izzy at camp, she replied with an exasperated voice, “I always play with her.”
-a good learner: She loves school and is, according to her teachers, right where she needs to be developmentally. She perfected the spelling of her name a few months ago, and she likes writing down other things too. (She recently wrote strawberries and crackers on our grocery list on the refrigerator, for example.) She’s also getting more into numbers, doing simple math problems like 2+2.
-big: At her recent four year check-up she was in the 95 percentile for height and off the charts for weight. She is taller than several of the girls in Zoe’s (old) kindergarten class!
-very much like her sister at this age: I had to chuckle when I read Zoe’s four-year update – aside from the big-sister stuff, Avery likes/does a lot of the same things Zoe did back then! Might be the age or a Browdy thing – or perhaps both…
-M
