Status report: Chloë, 3 years 7 months, and Maia, 22 months

I have no coherent thoughts today, because coherent thoughts are for people who haven't been woken up multiple times for an hour or more by their children who ought to be sleeping peacefully through the night and not up screaming and bouncing in their cribs, dammit. But we're leaving soon for Seattle (vacation! Plane ride! Other people to watch the girls!) and the monthly report must go up. 

What's been accomplished this month? Well, we're all still alive. Also, Maia's working on counting and Chloë has asked "Can we continue cleaning up?" which will never happen again, but totally charmed me when it did. And nightly naked time has morphed into dress-up time:

This has been a big month for numbers, for both girls. Maia can now recognize most letters and some numbers, and is working on counting. It's still a tossup whether she'll remember five and count normally, or skip it and go to "six, eighteen, eleven," but at least she does it sometimes. Even if she slips "twelveteen" in there. 

I mean what I mean, dahling.

Chloë's very taken with addition, and is at least cognizant of subtraction. We're working on the plus and minus symbols. Tonight she asked me "How much is three plus three?" I told her, and then Eric asked her, "How much is three plus four?" She said brightly, "Let's count!" and held out her hands, three fingers on one, four on the other, and counted them up.

Chloë, talking about the prize she wants for learning to not only sit on the toilet without a potty seat, but wipe herself while sitting (hooray!): "It should be very sparkly with all my favorite colors. One, green. Two, turquoise. Three, purple. And four, pink," ticking them off on her fingers.

(We got it today. It was a purple headband with a big purple flower that had some rhinestones in the middle.)

Maia, methodically taking blocks out, then putting them back in the little wagon they belong in: "One in. Two in. Three in. Four in. Five in. Six in."

So: numbers and words, all of them, being sucked in by both girls. It's delightful to watch in both of them. Each day there's some little nuance that wasn't there before. Maia's grasped the "stop counting when you run out of things to count" concept; Chloë asked "Is there a barn in our world?" tonight because she knows that Dora and Diego and Huckle and Lowly aren't in our world.

They're playing with each other more and more, not just things like blocks and trains (though those are delightful; the other evening when I came home Chloë greeted me with "Come see our surprise that is ruined!" which turned out to be a perfectly wonderful configuration of train tracks with the hill a bit askew) but games of "This is the stage and let's be dancers," and "There's a monster ghost out there, let's hide in our tent." Here, for example, they are wearing their safety helmets to ride their motorcycle/truck/boat/spaceship:

Chloë continues to be whiny; Maia continues to be screamy and tantrumy when she doesn't get her way, and also increasingly at bedtime. And after bedtime. Did I mention the middle-of-the-night wakeups? But they're also lovely to each other and to us. Maia's "I wove you too Dad/Mom" is the sweetest thing.  Chloë is working on orienting her clothes herself (reluctantly), and was so proud of herself when she stopped using the potty seat. "I'm the best girl ever!" Maia has started getting Chloë's box of wipes for her when she's on the toilet (since Chloë hasn't advanced so far that she's not holding the toilet seat with a death grip while she's on it). Chloë is admittedly a bit of a tattletale whenever Maia steps out of line, but it's often because she's genuinely worried. "Maia is going toward the street!" she'll call if they're on the driveway and I'm around the corner momentarily. "Maia, don't go in the street! The cars will get you!" Maia continues to be more independent, but Chloë's also fond of taking the lead. They're both pretty intrepid explorers together. We like them that way.