Must ... Blog ...

The longer I wait to write, the more I have to write about and the more overwhelmed I feel about it. Blogging is supposed to be fun! Blogging is not a chore.

I haven't been writing about all the funny things the Boogie says.

Yesterday she asked me a question and I answered it. "Honey!" she exclaimed, "you're a genie-yus!"
I was surprised. I didn't know she even knew that word and to use it correctly? (I will not argue about being a genius.) Impressive.
"Do you know what a genie-yus means?" she went on.
Ohhhh, okay. She doesn't know what it means.
"What does genie-yus mean?" I replied.
"Genie-yus means you're bery, bery FUNNY!"
Well, okay, if I'm not exceptionally smart I can at least be exceptionally funny to my 3.5 year old.

When the Phebis wakes up in the morning or from a nap the Boogie looks at her in the crib (which I supposed does look kind of like a cage) and says, "Look, a baby _____!" So far she has been:
-a baby hippo
-a baby seal
-a baby fish
-a baby giraffe
-a baby zebra
-a baby jaguar
and those are just the ones I can remember. It's something different every time.

We do call the baby Phebis and the Boogie calls her that too. But she also has her own names for her: Feeboo and Foobee and my own personal favorite, Fahbis. Phahbis? Phabis? It's hard to spell nonsense words.

She had a 24-hour tummy bug last week. She complained all Wednesday morning that her tummy hurt. She says that all the time and we are mostly immune to it. It is just something she likes to say, the same as "I hurt my leg and I needa go to the hospital with Diego." I kept telling her that her tummy wouldn't hurt if she would eat something. Then she threw up. My bad. Thankfully it was pretty short-lived and almost exactly 24 hours later she starting perking up and pleading for food.

I got the animated Disney version of Peter Pan from the library for her while she was sick. She loves it and watches it almost every day. She gets very excited when Peter Pan shows up at the Darlings' house. She is surprisingly unafraid of the crocodile but doesn't like the Indian chief, Tiger Lily's father.

She is actually kind of wimpy. I was the exact same way when I was little. She is scared to death of people in costume or over-sized versions of something familiar. She is afraid to try something new. On October 30 we had a family fun day at church. There were activities for the kids to do and sheep and goats to feed and play with and a parachute to play games with. She loved the parachute games so much that at one point she was giggling so hysterically that one mom thought she was going to hyperventilate.

There was also an inflatable bounce house. I thought she would be anxious to jump in it but she didn't ask and after a while I realized she hadn't gone in it yet. I went to find her.
"Come on, it's time to go in the bouncy house! Do you want to?"
"No," she said, alarmed," I don't want to."
"Why not? It will be fun! Come on, let's go!"
"No!" she started to cry. "I don't want to! I'm scared!"
"What are you scared of? Look at all the kids in there. It will be fun! You'll have so much fun!"
"Noooooo, I doooon't waaaaaant tooooooo!"
So I did what any responsible parent should do and took off her shoes and shoved her through the little opening into the bouncy house. She sat by the mesh-covered window and wept and pleaded to get out while I stood right outside the window and coaxed her to jump just five times, promising that if she did I would let her come out AND would get her a cookie. After about ten minutes of that she finally noticed that the other kids were actually having a good time and when we got one of her little friends to come hold her hand she decided that she could give it a try.

 After she got going she stayed in there until it was time to take the house down. She jumped for probably about an hour. We put her to bed an hour earlier than normal and she fell asleep almost instantly!

The next morning I told her to put on her jacket so we could leave for church.
"I don't know how," she whined.
"Well, at least just try," I told her. So she did.

She got points for trying! We let her wear it that way to church, along with the shoes she put on the wrong feet. That's my girl.