40 months old

Emily is now 3 1/3 years old.   One of her current favorite activities is playing with her LeapFrog Fridge Magnetic Word Builder.  She's getting pretty good at following directions and finding the letters to spell the words.  She is also starting to associate phonetic sounds with letters--a beginning step towards reading.  Emily also likes playing pretend with her Little People figures and stuffed animals.  She has started playing more with babies and doing "mothering" activities with them.  I caught her trying to "feed" her baby the other day with her shirt up, although I don't think he was going to get much out of her bellybutton.  ;o)  Her baby currently has a blue sleeper on, so she says it's a boy and his name is Lincoln. :o)

The Christmas dresses have officially been retired to an undisclosed location.  About a week ago I started being a little stricter on the dress code in general.  She still has choices of what to wear, but it has to at least be a matching combination.  Amazingly enough, there actually haven't been that many battles outside of one big boundary-testing episode that was so obvious it almost made me laugh.  Emily changes her outfit up to five times a day, but usually comes up with more or less matching combinations.  She has even voluntarily put on a couple shirts that have literally been hanging in her closet for months with the tags still on.  There is hope!  However, I rarely choose to fight the hair battle at this point.  She loves her headbands (hippie style) and not only wiggles incessantly, but almost immediately pulls out any ponytail/pigtails I try to put in.  It will take a visit from Grandma or Aunt Courtney to accomplish that!

Sometimes I wish I had a tape recorder for all the little "conversations" and "negotiations" that take place between Emily & me during the day.  Of course, I can't remember most of them later.  Some make me mad, but most make me laugh.  One day Emily scolded me by saying, "Mommy, toilet paper is for bottoms and Kleenex is for noses," after catching me blowing my nose with a piece of toilet paper.  We've been working on regulating the amount of TP used after going potty and actually using Kleenexes to wipe her nose (as opposed to hands, clothing, or worst of all: sniffling).  I guess it's sort of sinking in.  Whenever Emily gets put in time-out on the steps she tries to "push" the banister over with her feet.  She then announces that, "I'm not sitting very well!"

Emily took a huge step backward this month in the potty department regarding #2.  It has been extremely frustrating.  At one point I began "Operation Potty Pennies" where Emily gets a penny each time she has a potty success of any kind and a penny taken away each time she has an accident.  They hang in magnetic clips on the fridge.  At the end of the day she puts the net amount in a money counting jar.  She caught on quickly and loves putting money in the jar, but it didn't seem like enough of an incentive/deterrent to make a difference for the first 2 weeks.  However, she hasn't had an accident in 3 days.  I hope I don't jinx that!

We didn't watch a lot of the Olympics, but Emily was pretty impressed by the parts we did watch.  One Saturday after lunch I turned on the women's aerial ski jumping.  By the time I returned to the living room Emily had pillows (a.k.a. "ice") lined up on the floor and was somewhat trying to imitate them by jumping off the couch.  Yikes!

I'm working on uploading the February pictures to Winkflash and the video player is below.