7 1/3

Seven years ago today Natalie was 4 months old. Obviously at some point I stopped counting the months and forgot about the date on the calendar and it's relation to her next birthday. Well, not my father in law...

He stopped by this afternoon with a box of donuts and a card for Natalie's 7 1/3 birthday like he does on the 4th of every month. He lives a few blocks away from us, and we have weekly dinners with him on Saturdays, plus he's my go to man when we need anything fixed in the house.

Since I am on a roll with the blog updates, I might as well do another Natty post on my big girl.

-She is generally just a happy, smiley girl, but she can tend to get in a grumpy mood quick when life isn't going according to her plans, especially when it comes to her best friend not being able to have a play date.

-She recently found a baby calendar that I wrote things in for most her first year and she loves looking at it. She told me how much she loves it, so I spent today looking for baby pictures to match the months and milestones in the calendar so we can add to it. Since she discovered the calendar she likes to play and pretend she's a baby again, something she used to do a lot. When she was about four years old she asked for Santa to make her a baby again on her wish list--so precious.

-She is very precise when it comes to time telling. She'll ask me what time it is and if I say, "8:00" she will say, "Exactly 8:00?" so I'll say, "No, it's 7:57" and she'll say, "Okay, that's not 8:00" 😐 No idea who she gets the smart mouth from...

-She likes looking through her yearbook and deciding who has the most unique name/last name. We  play a game where we choose two people and decide between them who's name is less common, something that started in kindergarten.

-She is well behaved most the time, but man do I have to repeat myself 100 times to get her to listen. I don't know or really think she's intentionally trying to ignore me, I think she just tunes me out and is busy in her own world that she doesn't process what I say until I sternly tell her.

-Just like when she was younger, she seems to prefer the company of adults over her peers. She does like to make friends from time to time with new faces but she gets a lot of positive attention from the adults around her (even if it's another parent on the playground) with encouragement or amazement at her cartwheels and such. She's literally gone over and made friends with adults on the playground. I love that she has the courage to chat up grown ups.


Updated 4.9.19

She says the funniest and cutest things.  We were walking home from school a few days ago and she randomly asked me, "How do bees decide who's the queen? Do they have a contest? And see who's the better dancer?" She knows they don't really have a dance contest to see who's queen but I absolutely adore her silly nature.

Last night after her bath she was looking out of the bathroom window as a train with graffiti was going by and she said, "Who hires people to do vandalism on trains?" and the usage of the big word vandalism (I didn't even know she knew that word) along with thinking someone pays someone to do that was just so precious.

She got a new baby doll thanks to some money from Matt's aunt and uncle who visited from Pennsylvania this weekend, and she has been such a good little mommy since! She brought her baby along with us wherever we went and packed her a diaper bag. She dotes on the baby like it's real and the first thing she asked about yesterday when she came home was where her baby was. She calls me and Matt the grandparents and asked me if I wanted to hold the baby. I did but apparently not very carefully so Natalie got a bit annoyed and asked me to give the baby back to her. Once I did she said to the doll, "I'm sorry you have a bad grandma." Haha!