Kylie's Golden Birthday!

Today is Kylie's 4th birthday. She is pretty excited. What follows is LONG. That is your warning:) What can I say. There is just so much to say! Kylie. My teacher. The girl who teaches me new things every day. I always thought that parents were supposed to teach their children. I suppose that is still true, but I am also being taught constantly by this treasure of ours and some days she is a hard teacher.
She teaches me flexibility. She is so incredibly unpredictable that her unpredictability is predictable. (got that?!) I just never know what a day will bring. Routine is not a word in her vocabulary. One day she will be content to stay at home all day and she will play barbies or dolls or farm cheerfully for hours. The next day she will ask me thirty-six times, “Where are we going?” or “When are we leaving?” and when the answer is “Nowhere” and “We’re not!”, then a round of pronounced whining is sure to follow. One day she will be seemingly starved all day and ask for snack three minutes after breakfast and another snack four minutes after that etc. etc. till I am convinced she will eat none of her meals. Those are the days she surprises me and finishes her food in record time. Other days she will let a plate or bowl of food last hours if could – but I end up feeding her and getting it done and over with. I told her that once she turns four, I will no longer feed her . . . but I’m not sure it will be worth the pain. One day she will be super excited about cleaning her room up or putting all her toys away or straightening the mat, and the next day (or moment), she will refuse to take three steps to put a single object away b/c it is “too hard” or “too scary”. One day she will fall asleep in the afternoon in the van (this seems to be where she does her best falling asleep), the next day(okay the next 33 days) she’ll be up till 10 or 11pm. One day she’ll sleep in till 8:30am and the next 27 days she’ll be up before the boys at 7am. I could go on and on. She just keeps life so interesting. And that is a good thing most days. Of course “dull” every once in a while would be fine too:).
She teaches me patience and perseverance. No further explanation required? She has much more endurance than I do when it comes to push or shove. This takes great self-discipline on my part to not let her walk all over me. (and it is a discipline I am constantly striving after)
She teaches me to be easy going. If she wants to wear all pink (in three different shades) – so be it. If she wants to wear her hair a certain way a certain day – so be it. If she wants to go to Bible Study in her princess dress – fine. Having said that – I DO draw the line at certain times. She does need to be somewhat presentable for certain occasions.
She teaches me not to value clothing too much. She can destroy an outfit pretty quickly. She is not the neatest child in the world. In fact – more often than not, she looks a bit like a ruffian. She is well known for walking into church all prim and proper and walking out to the van afterwards in a grand state of disarray. That’s Kylie!
She teaches me to be humble. Again, not too much explanation is required. She really isn’t the model child. BUT!!!!

She is so much fun. She is full of life. She is interesting and exciting. She is rambunctious and crazy. She makes us all laugh. She makes us all roll our eyes. She keeps us on our toes. So we wouldn’t trade her in. We love her just the way she is. We’re pretty sure she’ll figure out how to be prim and proper some day, or at least proper, but if she doesn’t, it won’t surprise us too much.
I’ve already alluded to some of these things already, but I want to make a specific note of these things for my memory (or lack thereof:)).

-Kylie has developed a GREAT imagination over the last year. With the boys off to school, some adjustments had to be made. It took a while, but now she is a great player. She will sit for long periods of time and jabber away. If I hear her yelling “Mooooommm”, I most often don’t go running. She is just calling her Barbies’ mother or her babies mom. It is so much fun to just listen to her talk. I’d love to get it on video, but it’s hard to be sneaky.

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- Kylie LOVES to sing. If you come into our house at any given moment, you are sure to hear, Sharon, Lois, and Bram, Bullfrogs & Butterflies, or Twenty-Five Praise and Worship – with Robert Munch thrown in rather often too (but he doesn’t sing). It won’t always be those tapes/CD’s. We’ll move on to other ones, but it usually takes a few months. She learns them incredibly quick, and once she knows them, she LOVES them! (the Sharon, Lois, and Bram CD is from the library – we take it home for one week, renew it the second week and then return it, and then the next week grab it again and start over! Good thing they sing fun songs!) You can often find her with the hymnbook open standing somewhere belting it out with the tapes. It is quite cute. (and she sings mostly on tune too!) She also loves Adventures in Odyssey (and has her favorites that she will listen to over and over and over).

- Kylie can tell a story too. This goes along with her imagination and her playing with dolls I suppose, but it also presents itself when she prays. She’ll start out with the things she hears Kevin and Kade pray for, but it can quickly turn into a story about the van or cats or princesses or whatever. She prays kind of like a run on sentence. It is very hard not to laugh – but laugh we must not. She gets horribly embarrassed and will run off crying if she is laughed at. I know better, but the boys are still learning. This week we prayed the Lord’s Prayer outloud and she was pretty much the loudest. I think Kade was just mostly impressed that she knew it so well, but he laughed at her. She ran out of the room in tears. We had to console her with the fact that Kade was happy she knew the words so well.

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- Kylie loves her cat. Spotty gets a ton of loving. And right now she sneaks him into the house all the time. I don’t particularly love it. Actually I don’t love it at all, but I often look the other way, b/c that cat is her playmate and she has such fun with it. I will be glad when the weather stays warm and she can play outside with him comfortably. The cat loves her too – he sits in the windowsill of whatever room we may be in and looks inside. He’s a very friendly sort.
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- Kylie loves pink, princesses, and dress up. If she ever has friends over, they are very quickly out of their day clothes and into their dress up dresses. -Kylie loves gum and candy. Too much. First dentist appointment in a few weeks. Yikes.
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-Kylie loves the phone. She races to answer it before I get there – and b/c she does a pretty good job most of the time, I often let her – unless I’m expecting a certain caller. If I do answer the phone and she is not otherwise occupied, you can be sure that she will make herself known. “CAN I TALK, MOM? CAN I TALK? IS IT OMA, MOM? CAN I TALK? WHEN CAN I TALK?!!!!” It is then that I wish I had a bigger house and a room I could lock her out of. -Kylie loves storytime at the library. It is one of her highlights of the week and she is a model “student” there. She knows the songs and routines by heart and loves the stories and crafts.
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-Kylie also loves her friends. (although I know she is not always the nicest friend to play with). She seems to be the bossiest and usually gets her way – “he who makes the most noise wins”. But I’m pretty sure her friends still love her and any fights are usually resolved as quickly as they started.

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- Kylie lives off of very little sleep. Her average night is 10-7. Not too good for a three going on four year old – yet she does well with little sleep. (She reminds me a lot of Kevin in this way). She doesn’t like to sleep alone, so if we really want her to sleep a bit earlier, we put her in the room with the boys. Sometimes this totally backfires and we have three kids awake way too late, but it’s a gamble that seems to work more often than not.

-Kylie loves to swing. She also loves the trampoline (and tries unsuccessfully to get Spotty on there with her!)

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-Kylie loves to be “pretty”. That may sound like a contradiction to what I said earlier, but it’s true. She loves to have her hair done a certain way. She loves nail polish. She’d wear makeup if she could, and she will absolutely beam if you tell her she is pretty or beautiful. The joke around here is “Kylie you are pretty! Pretty ugly!” It’s funny to watch her face change from the first half of the phrase to the second.

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-Kylie loves to help with housecleaning until it means actually working. Give her a wet dookie and she will go for a good while. Ask her to put her toys away and she will procrastinate for a good while. This seems to be changing. In the last two weeks, she has done some serious cleanups and done a very good job too. A bit of praise (or a LOT) goes a long way. She is very proud of herself. But like I said earlier, there are days, when praise just doesn’t inspire AT ALL!
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-Kylie is a counter sitter. We have tiny counters in our house, but she will plop herself up there several times a day – to listen to music, to eat, to watch/help me make a meal, or to just get in the way.
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-Kylie is not the smartest child academically. That’s okay. She mostly knows her alphabet. She can count to 20 sometimes and she just learned to make an “E” (with 20 legs). I’m pretty sure she’ll be fine – but I can tell she is my third. I am content to let her enjoy being a little girl. The learning will come soon enough, but for now, most of she’s learned, she’s been taught by her brothers or just by life itself.

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- If Kylie is in a good mood, she does not call me mom. I am Aunt Denise. Not sure where that comes from, but whatever. I am still mom when she is grumpy, mad, or hurt:).

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-Kylie loves the last sip of my coffee. If I forget, she is not happy with me. If I remember, I am rewarded with, “ Oh thanks mom!”

-I’m sure there is a ton more that I’d love to remember about Ky at this stage in her life, but I’ll end with a few quotes of hers. I wish I wrote them down more often and am going to try to, but for now here are a few:

1) One day she was watching me do my makeup. She sat beside me on the counter and said, “I just need to makeup my mind like you mom.”

2) First thing in the morning (after a rough night when she was out of bed a few times) she comes up to me and says, “Who was that girl who was here last night?” To which I replied that I really hadn’t seen anyone and no one was here. “Yah, I saw her!” I asked her what she looked like (thinking maybe she got her nights mixed up and remembered someone from a few days ago). “She had sharp nails and green eyes!” (Guess what movie she watched the day before???? Snow White. We also have a tape of Snow White which she has pretty much memorized, but she still does a little shudder when the “wicked old peddler woman” comes. )

3) After I sneezed a few times she exclaimed, “You are getting a cold and have a lot of bless yous coming!”

4) And one of our favourites – said with great disgust, “That’s parfetic!” (pathetic). Oh Ky. We love you to bits. We love you just the way you are. You are a special little girl and have a special place in a lot of hearts. Keep being you. (I’m sure you will!) We pray that you will have a wonderful birthday and that God will continue to bless your life and make you a blessing to others. May you live for the Lord the best you can! It’s not easy, but keep trying. We love you!!!

Love Dad and Mom