All About Bella

Bella is full of drama. Just now she came up to me and said “Oh Mama,  there are two things I dearly love. Two things that are my whole world! Elmo and Sleeping Beauty. They are just my whole world!”  She is hilarious.

Bella should always wear this color! Look at those eyes!

I see so much resemblance to Jacob in this picture…

Can you see it too? (Aww… toddler Jacob! So cute!!1)

Bella still carries around her minky dot pink baby blanket. At one time she would pretend there was a puppy inside, named Mister Pettybone.  But now it is just a blanket named Mister Pettybone. (which is actually the cat on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.) But our Mister Pettybone is a girl.  And woe to anyone that refers to Mister Pettybone as a “he”. Confused yet?  The blanket is kind of like a friend to her, in that she will tell us what she (the blanket) is thinking and feeling and things like that.  It gets washed a lot.

Bella does not like to stay in bed at night. She will get up and lay down with her blanket on the bottom step and wait for one of us to notice her and put her back to bed.  She is very sneaky and will lie very quietly, we have found her up as late at 10 pm.  She is not very fun the next morning at 6 AM on those nights, so I try to keep an eye out in case she gets up.

She is different from Jacob in so many ways. Jacob deeply desires to please others (which is great, except when sometimes he follows the wrong kind of behavior) while Bella is much more independent.  She is a leader type personality already.  She will not obey  purely for the sake of following the rules.  With Jacob I can say “We do this because it is the rule, or the law, or it keeps us safe” and that is that.  Bella will ask “Well, what will happen if I don’t? What will happen if I do?” She wants to know exactly how much trouble she will get into if she does the wrong thing and exactly what her reward will be if she does the right thing.  So I have to parent her differently.  It’s more work in some ways, because it is easier to teach rules than it is to teach self-control and self-discipline to a three year old. But the up side is that she is adventurous and brave and truly a much more flexible child than Jacob was at this same age.

She is still loving her ballet class and has her recital at the end of April.

She wears a mix of 3T and 4T clothes. She is growing – I see her legs and cannot believe they are the same little legs on the same little girl. OK, I know all kids do this lengthening out thing where they lose that baby chub but it still startles me in a way how fast they move from toddler to little kid.

Plus, everything is magic when it’s your child, they make the smallest thing seem miraculous.

If you think that a three year old can push her baby all the way to see the turtles and back (4 blocks each way), you will be wrong. You will end up carrying the child, and the camera and the empty box of stale Kashi Go Lean (good for turtle food and not much else)  all while hunched over trying to push a tiny shopping cart most of the way back. By the 2nd block you will take your 6 year old’s mardi gras beads and wrap them around the handle and drag that bleepin’ grocery cart the rest of the way home with one hand and carry the 3 year old over your shoulder while she screams the entire way because you tried to make her walk when she was tired and “that was SOOOO RUDE MOMMY!”  and the wheel will fall off like three times. Which is also SOOO RUDE MOMMY.   But it was really cute on the way there, wasn’t it?