Gymnast

Language funnies:

• Getting ready to leave for school one morning, Evie wanders off down the hall.  I call after her, "Come here, sugar!"  She says, "What you say?"  I said, "I said, come here, sugar."  Pause.  She call's back, "Okay, Mama dessert!"
• One morning, Evie's looking exceptionally lovely, so I say to her, "Evie, you're beautiful, you know that?" (and I don't say this too often so she doesn't get weird about her appearance, but I say it enough for her to know that she is).  She says, "Thanks!  You're more beautiful."
• Later that day, Seth is trying to help Evie get ready for bed and she's throwing a threenager tantrum.  I go in.  She says, "I don't like Daddy."  I say, "That's not a nice thing to say.  What do you mean you don't like Daddy?  Why?"  She says, "Because he's not more beautiful." 
• Talking to Tia on the phone, Evie decides she needs to address temporal concepts in her conversations: "I went to ballet.  *Pause*  This week, *Pause*  Ago."
• She overgeneralizes final t on the ends of words.  This week she requested "watert" to drink, asked where her "stickert" from ballet was, and, seeing some spit up from one of the dogs on the floor, yelled, "EWWWWW!  SLOBBERT!"
• She also loves going to "bymnastics" on Thursdays.

Speaking of gymnastics, I don't mean to brag, but...  She's pretty good!  I got there early yesterday to watch her and she definitely has good form (not that I know anything about gymnastics, honestly).  I was talking to the teachers afterwards because I'd like to enroll her two days a week next semester.  At first, they thought I was the mom of another little girl there, Eliana, and they kind of unenthusiastically said, "Oh yeah, that would be fine."  Then they realized that Eliana already goes two times a week and confusion set in.  One of them said, "I thought Ellie already comes Tuesdays and Thursdays."  I said, "No, sorry, I'm Evie's mom."  Both their faces lit up, "Ohhhhhh, Evie!  Yeah!  She does so good!  We'd love to have her two days a week!"  All the exclamation points!.  Here's some video I took through the glass.  In one of these, the teacher does a correction to explain which way Evie is supposed to be flipping and she just goes, "Okay!" and does it correctly.  I'm so proud.

I'm also proud of Evie's budding literacy.  Here she is singing/reading her Five Little Pumpkins book.

I forgot last week to mention that Grannadaddy, Evie, Daddy and I went out to dinner one night while Granna was out of town.  Grannadaddy assisted in Evie's sharing of Seth's fried chocolate pie ala mode.  I love all the smiles.

Last Friday they had a "Peace-nic" at school.  They had done a week about concepts of peace and Friday commenced with releasing of doves, a singer who led them in lots of songs about peace and respect for others, and a picnic with the parents.  We had a nice time eating on the ground and playing with her school friends.

Last Saturday night, we had a Fall Festival at church and Evie dressed up as Merida.  She was quite a sight, with that red curly wig bouncing around behind her.

We went to my parents' house last Friday night to watch the football game.  Evie did us all proud by yelling "Go Tigers!" at random intervals.  Grannadaddy was at a wedding rehearsal for a couple in the church so Evie asked Granna, "Why you live here by yourself?"  Granna reminded her that Grannadaddy lived there too.  "Oh....  Why you not live with your Daddy?"  Oh my goodness, the tears swelled up.  My Pappaw's been gone since Dec. 26, 2008.  Granna handled it beautifully and said that she was now old enough to live without her Daddy.

That was the first of a couple times this week we had to kind of skirt around the issue of death.  My aunt Kathy's cat Pooka got out a couple of weeks ago and hasn't returned.  Kathy assumes Pooka, who was 17, probably got out to find somewhere to die as cats tend to do.  When we went to Kathy's house Sunday for lunch, Evie wanted to go find Pooka so over the course of several minutes we explained that Pooka wasn't there anymore, that she'd gone to heaven.  Evie asked, "Where in heaven?"  We talked about it some more on the way home, but I gotta say, I wasn't really prepared for that.  She hasn't seemed bothered by it this week, so presumably we didn't do any emotional damage.  Parenthood is certainly a roller coaster of emotions.