:: return of light: at three and a half (...almost).

Somehow, my sweet little girl is almost three and a half. That is heartbreakingly, impossibly old, and I'm really, really glad to have another baby on the way, because I am SO not ready to be done with having teeny-tiny kids. A post I wrote this time last year - "at two and a half (...almost)" - popped up in my Facebook memories the other day, which was a good reminder that I meant to document details about Rowan more frequently. Like, I had planned on doing it every month, or at least every few months, or at least every six months. Looks like we're on the once-a-year track for now, so...whatever.

This is Rowan, at three and a half:

Fun fact: This is the only picture I have from the last
six weeks or so where she's not wearing a Bat costume.

:: Her imagination is probably her strongest personality trait right now. She spends hour after hour, day after day, weaving her imaginary worlds with her toys. She builds cities out of roads and train tracks and play houses, and then all of her little "guys" - dolls and little plastic figures from Frozen, Peppa Pig, Daniel Tiger, and more - make their way through the cities, usually encountering "emergencies."

:: But the most prevalent way her imagination comes through is how she pretends she's Batman. She used to be Rey from Star Wars, and J.J. was BB-8, but now, she's Batman. All day, every day for the last month or so, she wears her "Bat-dress" and her mask. Everywhere she goes, passersby say hello to Batgirl, and she's quick to correct them: "No, I'm BatMAN." (We're working on a polite way to say that.) She and J.J. (aka Robin) saw the Lego Batman movie a couple weeks ago, and she works details from the movie into her play. I know nothing about Batman, so I'm not usually involved in the play. I wasn't cool enough to be given a Bat-name until about a week ago. We were in a big snuggly family hug, and I told Batman I loved her. She said, "I love you, too, Mama! I mean, I love you, too..." - and J.J. and I glanced at each other over her head, eagerly awaiting the christening of my Bat-name - "...The Witch!" FYI, there is no The Witch in the Batman world. Trust me, I asked. And she literally calls me "The Witch," whether we're in the middle of a game or just walking around Target. Here, she uses it casually while praising me:

:: Speaking of Target, one of her other great loves in mannequins. She thinks they're little friends for her. She hugs them, kisses them, chats with them, and makes me take pictures of her with them.

Pretty sure those boots are on backwards.

:: Besides preschool two mornings a week, she's taking gymnastics and dance classes, and she wants to take swim lessons, even though she's convinced she knows how to swim. That's actually part of the reason I WANT her to take swim lessons - because she thinks she can, when she can't really. She can swim underwater for a few feet, but that's about it.

:: Preschool is going great! She had a tough time at drop-off for a while, but that's a thing of the past now. I can't say she has "best friends" at school, but she always has a wonderful time and is full of stories about her morning when I pick her up. Her teacher is one of her favorite people on the planet - "She's my teacher AND my buddy," Rowan will say. I made the mistake of mentioning that Miss M. wouldn't be her teacher forever, and Rowan cried the saddest, purest tears I've ever seen her cry before. I wanted to take it back immediately and tell her that Miss M. would be her teacher for the rest of her life. Honestly, I'd be pretty okay with that scenario. All in all, we love, love, love her school. --Oh, one cool thing they do is invite "mystery readers" to read a book to the group. Anyone who's special to one of the students can come share a story. J.J. was the mystery reader a few weeks ago, and I seriously thought Rowan was going to explode when she saw him. She almost literally flew into his arms:

Please note that Robin is wearing his cape. :) :)

:: Rowan is learning to write all her letters, and she loves to draw. We like to write stories together - she dictates the text and draws the picture, I write the words for her. Usually the stories are about thunderstorms. When she does write her own letters, it's typically her name. When she was making a valentine for J.J., she turned her R for Rowan into a B, and then proceeded to write the rest of the letters for "Batman"...so that's how she prefers to sign her name now.

The card she insisted on getting for Robin. :)

:: After going the last half of the summer, all of the fall, and part of January on a horrrrrible sleep pattern of waking up two to five times a night, she appears to have remembered that she can actually sleep through the night without assistance. I am praying I didn't just jinx it there, because that sleep regression (or whatever it was) suuuucked. Rowie ONLY wanted me to help her, and honestly, it's getting harder to roll out of bed with this big belly in my way. Generally, she takes a nap from about 12:30 to 2:30 every day (I wake her up then so she'll actually go to sleep at a decent hour). Some days, she just rests, which is fine because I want her to learn to still stay in her bed and be relatively quiet for an hour or two, even if she's not sleeping...Mama needs that break! We wake her up at 7:00 in the morning so that we can all get dressed and out the door in time for work/school/etc., and at night, she's in bed around 7:30 and asleep around 8:30.

:: She is beyond ready to be a big sister. She massages my back when it hurts, she talks to the baby, she loves to feel him kick, and she has all sorts of plans for living with Gramma after he's born. :) I fear a little for the baby, though, based on this recent interaction between Rowan and her (seven-months-younger) cousin:

:: Rowie's favorite foods these days...hmm, hard to say. She's still an awesome eater and will try almost anything, but she has much stronger opinions and preferences than she used to. She still loves my Mexican quinoa; she requests a grilled cheese sandwich with Annie's Goddess dressing for lunch every day; and pretzels are her favorite snack, mostly because she can get them herself from the pantry. She loves the mac & cheese from Panera Bread, but I still can't find a brand that she'll eat at home (and god forbid I try to serve my homemade mac & cheese to her). She loves scrambled eggs, but only with ketchup (EW). She'll eat anything with vinegar splashed on it, so pretty much every night with dinner she has a salad (spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers) with some apple cider vinegar on it. Oh, she LOVES gorgonzola cheese and eats it - plain - with as many meals as I'll allow her to have it. For a while, I couldn't drink anything that wasn't sparkling (special pregnant snowflake alert), so now Rowan always wants "sparkly red orange juice," which is sparkling water + orange juice + red fruit juice.

:: Besides ~~Daddy~~ Robin and her teacher, her favorite person in the world is Gramma, J.J.'s mom. She invites herself over to Gramma's house regularly, and she literally cheers when I tell her it's a Gramma Day. She told Gramma that she's going to live with her for the summer, after the baby comes. (Not her worst idea.) There's a bedroom at Gramma's house that she has claimed as her own; she sleeps there for sleepovers, and Rowan even moved all the children's books in the house onto the bookshelves in that room.

:: Can't believe I almost forgot to mention Hayjack! A couple months ago, Rowan unearthed a random Beanie Baby cat from our basket of stuffed animals. I can't say she'd ever given the cat a second glance before, but she randomly latched onto it and has carried it with her EVERYWHERE ever since. When I asked her if he had a name, she responded "Hayjack" without hesitation. Poor Hayjack is turning pretty gnarly and grungy, but at least he's getting to see the world. He was even bestowed a nametag at preschool:

:: She still loves decorative Band-Aids and is allowed to put a new one on after her bath each night.

:: Her favorite books right now are Curious George books. They're mostly fine, but I made the mistake of getting some old-school ones at the library last week, and they're soooooo looooong. We read three books before bed, in the morning, and when she wakes up from nap, and I'm getting dead sick of George, I have to say. The cute thing is that she's memorized all the books, so we have a tradition now of reading the books "together" - I read a page, she reads a page, etc. Every once in a while I get to sneak in a non-George book, which can either be a book about becoming a big sister (we have a few) or one from her Girl Power book that J.J.'s cousin got her for Christmas (I love those ones!). Curious George is her favorite thing to watch on TV, too, except at Gramma's house, where she loves to watch Peppa Pig.

:: She finally allows me (yes, ALLOWS me) to listen to music other than her music class CDs in the car - all thanks to my niece, who was visiting over Christmas and mentioned that Adele is her favorite. Rowan idolizes my niece, so now I'm allowed to play a CD in the car that has a bunch of Adele songs on it. It's also a Mumford & Sons CD, actually, so that's a win.

:: Other random loves of Rowan's: using chopsticks, grape-flavored Tylenol, playing light sabers outside in the dark, putting slippers on first thing in the morning, and "checking the drains." We have a friend who's been heavily involved in getting fresh water to residents in Flint, MI, where the tap water's been poisoned with lead for the last few years. Rowan heard about her advocacy and action, and she wanted to help, too, so she pretends to be a "drain checker" and looks down every drain, sewer, and pipe to see if the water's clean.

:: She wants to be a million things when she grows up, but most recently and prominently, she wants to be a cardiologist, a librarian, and an engineer. She'll tell you she's already an engineer, actually, because of the time she figured out how to fix a little magnetic train wheel. She sat back with a surprised look on her face and said, "Huh! I fixed it! Hey, engineers are kind of like superheroes!"

:: Rowan and I have a "secret kiss" now, sort of like a secret handshake, where we each click our tongues and then give each other a smooch. She likes to tell me she loves me more than I love her - that she loves me "ten a million fifty dollars." I have to say, though, even though three has been a lot more challenging than two (the whining, the stubbornness, the tantrums, the drama), I will always love her more.

...So much and every day and all the time, because she's my ~~Rowan~~ Batman.