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The other day I walked into her room to check on her and found her playing lullabies on her baby tad and gently rocking each of her stuffed animals to sleep.  Later, I found her combing her toy Lion’s hair.  She’d gently comb his hair then run into the bathroom for another kind of brush or comb and comb his hair some more.  I spent some time sitting with her and talking to her and she soon became silly and started jumping while combing her own hair. 

On Saturday when Isaac was out with his dad, we spent some time playing together. She chose a container with an odd assortment of small toys, mostly Pez dispensers.  She started out comparing them.  ‘this one has little ears, this one has big ears. . .’ she grouped them in a variety of ways, comparing each of their features.  At one point, some of them fell down and she decided it was time for them to go to bed.  She made them a little bed with a blanket and gently tucked each one in.  She got out some books and read the books to the Pez dispensers.  This turned into a reenactment of the story 5 Little Monkeys.  She collected each of her monkey toys and had them jump on the bed and fall down.  She used a phone to call the doctor and then as the doctor she looked in their ears, checked their blood pressure, and listened to their chests before calling the mom to tell them “no more monkeys jumping on the bed.”

These are the times that I enjoy the tender sweet girlish charm of Charlotte. 

Charlotte is sweet and affectionate.  She tells me that she loves me all day long.  She’ll  just say “Mom, I lub you.”  She says it at the store, at lunch, in the car, she says it almost as much as she says anything.  She also loves to hug and she gives the best hugs.  Isaac seems to think that the defining characteristic of a hug is touching cheeks, so his hugs are often stiff and short and don’t always involve putting his arms around me.  Charlotte on the other hand gives the perfect hug.  She wraps her arms around me and snuggles in close and she is almost never the first one to break the hug.  We hug first thing in the morning and last thing at night and multiple times throughout the day.  In fact, if I don’t give her 5 solid minutes of hugging in the middle of the day she becomes very irritable.  She asks to be my ‘backpack’ (a hug around my neck from behind while I’m sitting on the floor) or my ‘frontpack’ (I swing her around from a backpack to give her a big hug) or she’ll just get back and run straight towards me into the biggest hug she can muster.  I have to say that I’ve become quite addicted to my Charlotte hugs.  It’s hard to go to bed if I haven’t had that last hug at night.  I kneel at her bed and hug her and tell her how much I love her and she smiles sweetly as I hug her.

She loves to help mom.  If I’m making mashed potatoes, she’s as happy as can be handing me potatoes to peel and then putting the chopped potatoes in the pot.  If I’m sweeping, she grabs the dustpan and tells me she’s doing the ‘holding job’ as she waits for me to sweep dirt onto the dustpan.  When I put on make-up and fix my hair, she wants to sit right next to the bathroom sink and ask me to put make-up on her too.

Charlotte also has this tomboyish side to her.  She loves to put her hands in the dirt.   For awhile each time we’d get out of the car after going to the store or the library she’d take a detour through the yard to find a stick and wouldn’t come into the house without one.  Lately, she’s been collecting a handful of dirt.  When I can’t convince her to leave her dirt  outside, I have her throw the dirt in the garbage as soon as she steps in the door.  As a person who hates getting dirt under her fingernails, I don’t understand this aspect of Charlotte’s personality.  When we go outside to play, her favorite activity is to dig in the dirt.  She likes to turn her bicycle on it’s side and pour dirt over the top of it with her hands.  She says she’s ‘making ice cream.’  She would drive her little ‘green van’ over to the cracks in the concrete and dig at the dirt in the cracks.  At grandma’s house her favorite place to play outside is by the fence where she has found a small patch of dirt and sand from the neighbor’s yard.  She runs straight to that spot as soon as she enters their backyard.

I am thoroughly enjoying my little girl. 

Just a few months ago I found myself fretting about her and worrying that  we would have a difficult relationship.  She can be so strong willed and seemed to be constantly battling me or Isaac over everything.  She wanted everything a particular way and I felt like I was constantly going to war with her.  I was worried that this was a sign of things to come.  I imagined her as a teenager, still battling me over everything and telling me she hates me.  It was in the midst of these feelings that I decided that I needed to change the kind of mom I’ve been to her.  I decided to be as positive as I could with her.  Instead of correcting her as often as I was, I started pointing out every good thing that I could see her doing and complimenting her as much as I could.  I can remember struggling in my own mind to find something more than just “I love you and you’re such a pretty girl.”  I also started hugging her more.  In the middle of the day when she’d start to get irritable, I’d scoop her into my arms and say ‘”Charlotte, I love you so much” and just hug her for a few minutes before finding something else for her to do.  I stopped being so emotional about the things she did wrong.  I would just give her a quick emotionless consequence and remove her from the situation where she was getting into fights.  She went from hitting almost every day to now where I can’t even remember the last time I caught her hitting anyone. 

She still often gets irritable in the middle of the day, but the moment I hear her start getting irritable, I give her a big hug, tell her I love her and either have her help me with something or set her up with a new activity.  Her mood changes immediately.  She used to get into these moods and I’d have to advise Isaac not to touch her or any toy near her in order to avoid a fight and she’d inevitably still find some reason to be mad.

When I started to type this, I was only going to write about Charlotte and all the wonderful things I’ve enjoyed about her lately, but as I wrote, I remembered how she wasn’t always so affectionate and kind and I became more reflective than I had planned.