Her current obsession is bugs. I got her a dollar store bug catcher and now she is always asking me when we can go outside and catch bugs. The first day we got it I went inside for a minute to grab something and came back outside and Julia excitedly showed me the first bug she had got and put in her bug catcher. It was a bee! I asked her how she got it in there and she said she just picked it up and put it in. After that we had to lay some ground rules about nice bugs and mean bugs and we should only catch bugs that we know are nice bugs. She catches a lot of potato bugs, but her favorite bugs to catch are ladybugs.
She often wants to put her bug catchers (she has three of them now) by her bed when she goes to sleep. One night while she was in bed and just falling asleep the home telephone rang, which is pretty rare because people usually call our cell phones. The noise scared her and she jumped out of bed, grabbed her two bug catchers next to her bed and came racing into my room, bugs and all. They are that important to her.
Half an hour later she had fallen asleep in my bed, so I moved her back to her bed. When I returned to my bed I found the doors to both bug catchers wide open! I hurriedly counted how many bugs were still inside them and breathed a sigh of relief that all the bugs were still inside the bug catcher and not crawling around on my bed. Now we sometimes tape the lids closed when we are inside to prevent any escapees.
Her biggest struggle is continuing to potty train. We probably don't need to go into detail on this one, but it's sufficient to say that it has been frustrating on both her part and mine. Let's just say it's been complicated and we're all hoping to be done soon.
Julia is one brave little girl. She has a book about feelings and one of the feelings the book talks about is "I'm feeling shy." Julia had a hard time understanding what it meant to be shy because I don't think she has ever experienced it before. Whenever we go to the store and the cashier starts talking to her she has no problem telling the cashier about everything she has done that day. She also loves to make new friends at the park and loves it when friends can come over to play.
On Mother's Day, when it was the primary children's turn to go up and sing to their mothers, Julia walked right up to the front by herself (even as other sunbeams were crying that they didn't want to go up) and joined the kids. She didn't know the songs because we had been out of town the previous two weeks (and she was too little to read the words on the sign that they had to help the kids) so she just stood up there and smiled.
She will hop into the pool and swim all over without fear. The one thing she won't do however, is jump into the pool because she hates to get her face wet.
She is also pretty sweet. She had two pages of stickers in church on Sunday and instead of using them all she saved one so she could give to to her friends when she got to class. She will also randomly tell me I look pretty or give me a hug. Like I said, just sweet.
She loves to dance to music. Her big obsession for a while was Taylor Swift. She listened to her so often that I started getting nauseous every time I heard a Taylor Swift song, so we've had to lay off the Taylor Swift for a while.
She has the typical adore/annoy relationship with her little brother Micah. She loves him to pieces but she hates to share toys with him. He will pick up a toy she hasn't played with in months and suddenly it's the best toy in the world and she has to play with it right away. But she is very protective of Micah and usually sounds like a mini-me talking to him about what he should and shouldn't be doing because "it's dangerous." If he starts to go up the stairs she will drag him down off the stairs before he can get too far. If he gets too close to something he shouldn't be touching (like the mousetraps we used to have in our kitchen) she will stand in between him and the object and block his way.
Overall, she's your typical preschooler. Loud, picky (I have the hardest time getting her to eat her food), easily distracted and very active. She's mellowed out a bit recently, which has been nice. She doesn't have quite the crazy tantrums she used to have as a three year old. She can sit still for longer periods of time and can sit for an hour practicing using her scissors by just cutting up junk mail.
Here she is asking for more whipped cream and marshmallows for her hot chocolate. She ate all the whipped cream and marshmallows, left all the hot chocolate.
She loves to help me out in the kitchen. It usually takes longer for me to get things done, which can be frustrating for me when I have a lot to do, so I'll find little things that she can help out with. Like putting the thump print on the Nutella cookies.
Learning to be independent means she is learning to dress herself. Every morning she goes into her room and chooses her own clothes and dresses herself. It is a matter of utmost pride for her to be able to say she did it all by herself. I made a picture list of things she needs to do in the morning and she loves to go through the list and do as much of it on her own as she can (brush hair, make bed, go to the bathroom, eat breakfast).
Here she wanted to wear her new hat for the family pictures.
She is going through a phase where she will often wake up at two in the morning and yell for me. Then she just wants to talk about random things. She is quite lucid and sounds very grown up. Last night she woke up and told me she was excited for Tuesday because that's when we were going to the Ranch. I never told her that, I think she just overheard it from when we were talking to my parents earlier in the day. When Robert's parents were here she woke up and told her grandpa about how she didn't like primary (There is only one other girl in her class and she had been out of town for the past month).
What a sweet four year old!
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