Virtute.org

I like to do a little personality sketch of each of my kids around their birthdays, only I got stuck trying to write about Ila as a 4 year old and it’s put me terribly far behind on my blogging.  Here is what I wrote about her last year. I don’t know why, but I have had trouble defining who she is right now.  I’ve decided that the only thing to do about it is to just start writing and hopefully by the end I’ll be happy with what I’ve written.

She’s small. It’s the first thing people notice about her. She was diagnosed over the past year with a growth hormone deficiency. They took an X-ray of her hand and determined that her bone age was about a year behind.  They took 7 vials of blood and found that the amount of growth hormone in her blood was abnormally low. She spent a day in the hospital having some tests done to see if they could stimulate production of growth hormone and she had an MRI.  The MRI showed an abnormally small pituitary gland. The doctor said that she has “pituitary dwarfism” which is just a scary way of saying she just isn’t making enough growth hormone. Her doctor recommended growth hormone injections. She started the injections in December. She was very nervous about them at first and cried and cried when she had her first shot. Now, she has gotten used to them and almost likes having them done. After the first prescription, we  didn’t reorder in time and she had about a week with no injections.  The day her new shot pen arrived she made up a song about how she loves being brave, she picked out her band-aide hours ahead of time and spent most of the day talking about getting a shot.  She had even taken up sleeping with the empty shot pen (without a sharp on it of course).  I think in some strange way it makes her feel special or big to get shots.

Ila is very attached to her mother and would almost always choose a boring time with mom over the offer of going somewhere fun with someone else. She’d cry every time I took her over to her Grandma Cochran’s house to be babysat. About a week and a half before her birthday she announced that she’d love Grandma when she was 4. She even claimed that when she was 4 she wouldn’t cry anymore when I dropped her off. We reminded her of her promise periodically by saying things like “in one more week you’ll be 4 and you’ll love Grandma.” When her birthday came, she was true to her word.  On her birthday she announced that she now loves Grandma. Instead of crying when I drop her off, she regularly wants to go over to Grandma’s house early. Over Christmas break she’d sometimes ask if she could go to Grandma’s house and then spend most of the day there and still be sad that she had to come home. She loves to look out the window and see whose home and will excitedly jump up and down if she sees all 4 cars home. I love seeing her become attached to her grandparents.

She has started commenting on a regular basis that she has “no polish on” which is her way of asking if she can put on my make-up.  She only puts on blush which she calls “polish” and foundation powder which she calls “skin.”  Then she admires her face in the mirror.  She likes to make silly faces at herself in the mirror.

She has a sweet infections laugh.  I love it.  When she’s happy she has a hop in her step and she says “boing” as she hops.

She loves to “crunch” in the snow.  She goes out of her way as we walk to step in the crunchy snow.

She loves the book “Dinosaurs Love Underpants.”  She asks for it every night because “it’s such a good book” and “it’s soo funny!”  She often picks one book and has me read it to her every night until she has it memorized.  She memorized a book about making a street and could recite it without even opening the book.

Ila is a super picky eater.  She’s the pickiest eater I’ve ever met.  She has an extremely small menu of foods that she’ll eat.  She’s never had a bite of pizza.  Her only experience with cheese is that she once licked a cheeto.  She didn’t even eat the cheeto or lick all the cheese off, she licked it once on one side.  She eats one kind of chips (Lays regular potato chips) she won’t even try any other kind.  Awhile ago they changed the bag.  It was such a subtle change that I hadn’t even noticed it, but Ila refused to eat them.  It took me a week to convince her that they were the same chips.  Here is a picture of the old bag and new bag next to each other:

She likes to draw pictures and deliver them to her friends in the neighborhood.  Sometimes I would bribe her to clean up a mess by promising her that we could deliver a picture after she cleaned it up.  One time a friend gave her a wadded up store ad in exchange.  Ila carried that crumpled up paper around for a full day, periodically straightening it out and asking me about the words and pictures on it.

She loves orange and princesses and Elephants.  Her favorite clothes are “easy pants” and her “American clothes” (a red, white, and blue skirt and shirt combination).