It would be too obvious to write that I can’t believe how fast four years has gone, so I’ll skip that and other sentimental stuff and dive right into the good stuff…

Overall, Zoe is a fun and bubbly four-year-old (who, until today, loved to tell people she was “three-and-three-quarters”). Her teachers recently told us she spends a lot of time at school acting silly and jumping around – which sounded pretty accurate to us. She’s always running around the house, making up games, playing pretend (she likes being a doctor, a teacher or, in a recent development, a baby), or directing me or Q (or whomever else is around) to do certain things. “Okay, guys,” she’ll say before launching into her instructions.

She loves art (she’s constantly drawing or doing little craft projects, and when I ask her to tell me one thing she did at school that day, she usually answers, “Draw”) and music. She often comes home singing something she’s learned at school, and she has several non-kid favorites, like Black Eyed Peas’ Imma Be (to which we sing, “Zoe B”) and Sixpence None the Richer’s Kiss Me. (We recently started listening to the latter; her favorite line is “Kiss me down by the broken tree house,” and she told me one day, “My heart loves this song.”) She likes a lot of different games; she plays Candyland at home and school, for example, and she loves playing memory on our phones.

As mentioned here before, she and her sister have gotten a lot more interactive. (When I used to ask what her favorite thing was about Avery, she would say her ears. The other day I asked and she told me, “Playing with her.”) She’s still a really good big sister, updating us on things related to Avery (“Daddy, she’s crying,” or “Avery’s quiet!”) and putting up (for the most part) with Avery when she tries to take her things. She does get frustrated, of course (we’ve had to do quite a few reminders about not pushing), and she now often tells me to “Save my spot” when she gets up to leave something she’s been doing. I know what she really means is, “Don’t let Avery take my place!”

She’s generally a happy, easy girl – and also fairly polite. She routinely says “thank you” or “please” at the appropriate times, and I always have to fight back a laugh when she says “no thanks” when we ask her to do something (e.g. clean up) that she doesn’t want to. I want her to listen, of course, but it’s difficult getting angry when she’s so polite about *not* listening!

With that said, she doesn’t always listen (do any four-year-olds?), and she has her difficult moments. “Stop doing that!” “You’re a bad guy,” or “I’m not going to be your friend!” she’ll yell out when particularly upset. There are times, too, when she reminds me of a teen-ager: “Fine!” she’ll say or “I already told you!” I’m not a huge fan of her outbursts, but earlier this fall, she had a tantrum-y moment that actually made me laugh: She was acting out and I commented to her, “Oh, I get it – you’re tired.” “No, I’m not tired! You don’t get it!” she yelled back at me.

Speaking of bad moods, we’ve had our ups and downs with bedtime; luckily, we’re in good phase right now. For many, many months she wouldn’t go to bed before hearing a book, a story and a song, but we slowly got her out of that (rigid) routine. (Now she’s more flexible about what is being done at bedtime, and who puts her to bed.) She also started sleeping with her stuffed hippopotamus, who took the place of her past bedtime partners – her brown dog, panda, and white bear. (And, interestingly, she likes to pretend that the hippo’s gender changes. “Today he’s a boy but tomorrow he’s a girl,” she’ll tell me.)

There have been two big developments since her last update: She has practically given up her nap (she’ll nap maybe one or two times a week), and she’s in a new class at preschool. She went from being one of the oldest to one of the youngest in her class, but the transition has been fairly smooth. She has made a few new friends, and she picks up new things (words, stories, ideas, etc.) a lot faster than she did last year. Whenever she tells us something new and we ask where she learned it, she’ll say “My own self,” or “My mind” – which makes me laugh.

A few random things: She recently started calling people “silly” a lot. (“That’s not right, silly,” she’ll say.) She’s very into secrets; “Don’t tell Daddy, but…” she’ll say before whispering something in my ear. She calls the weekends “Family Time.” Since meeting her cousins at Dan and Jenny’s wedding, she’s been talking about them non-stop. Starting a few weeks ago (totally out of the blue), she began insisting that she pick out her own clothes each day. (Lucky for us, given what’s in her wardrobe, her favorite colors remain pink and purple.)

And a few stories: Watching me put on my contacts one day, Zoe said, “When I grow up I want to put those ‘tings’ in my eyes, too.” When she was sick a few weeks ago, I slept on her bedroom floor; when she woke up and saw my lying there, the first thing she said was, “I love you.” Around the same time she was “reading” a Disney book to me. One side was Beauty and the Beast and the other was Cinderella, and she asked, “Do you want the story about the girl and the hippopotamus, or the girl dancing with Daddy?”

-M

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under 52.Two kids-November 10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.