On Currency...

Okay, so a little background info so everybody can understand the creepy lingo in this household (I often forget that what's normal to us makes us sound effing crazy to everyone else):

Monkey Joe's is a fun little place with a bunch of inflatable bounce houses that Sev loves to frequent. I took her to Chuck E. Cheese a couple times, which she associated with Monkey Joe's, and therefore this establishment is now known as "Mouse Monkey Joe's." We roll with it.
Also: we went to Christmas Eve service, and Sev learned about the Christmas story, complete with a baby Jesus (rumored to have been purchased at Walmart) and full nativity set. Seven now loves Jesus.

Okay, now that you're all filled in...

Sev was going through my purse while I was making business calls. She knows she's not supposed to do this, but does it anyway when she's not getting 100% attention, heaven forbid. After I was off the phone, she informed me what had happened. She told me she put all the money from my purse into her piggy bank, which I assumed meant a variety of bills. So we cracked open the piggy bank to really find nothing but coins. We dumped everything out on the floor, then started putting it back in the piggy bank. She discovered three coins from Chuck E. Cheese. She was determined to keep them out of the bank and hold on to them. I asked her to put them back in the bank. Her response?

"No, I want to keep the ones from Mouse Monkey Jesus."

My Kid is Awesome.

So, I was in the kitchen getting dinner ready just now. Seven walked into the kitchen, leaned casually against the dishwasher with her arms crossed over her chest, legs crossed at the ankles (you know, looking all West Side Story or Grease or something). She said, "So.... [tongue click], what's going on, dude?"


Also, Merry Christmas from Sev:

On Comet (on Cupid, on Donner, on Blitzen)...

Seven was given this plush little doll with purple yarn hair for her birthday. She immediately ripped the doll's clothes off, made her "dance" with Sean (a beanie monkey), and named the doll Comet. Sev freaking loves this doll.

The other night, we were coming home from an errand. It was rainy, cold, and windy, and I wanted to get up the stairs and into the house fairly quickly. I was trying to hurry Seven up the stairs and out of the rain. She climbed the stairs, cuddling Comet, shielding her from the rain as any good mommy should. She kept whispering to the doll, "Shhhh... it's okay. It's okay, honey. It's okay!" I nagged at Sev to get up the stairs and to not dawdle. She looked Comet right in the eye and said, "Honey, I'm so proud of you, but I need to leave now. I'm going to leave you right... here.... honey. See you later." And then she kissed the doll and arranged her nicely on the stair, in the rain, face-up, and started walking up the stairs.



Just a moment ago, I went into Seven's room to tell her to stop playing, turn out the light, and take a nap. Her new thing is putting EVERY SINGLE TOY on her bed and playing with them quietly when she should be napping. I went in there and started to remove various toys from her bed (see: large pink plastic shopping cart, blocks, etc.). I started to pick up a box that holds these cards for a memory game. Sev was holding Comet, reached out for the box and held on for dear life, yelling, "But! But.. but... but! But... but-but-but-but-but MOM! Comet wants to lay in the box and watch Skeleton TV!!!" I then gave into the cuteness. I can still hear her in her room, playing with her toys. Comet is probably enjoying some Skeleton TV as I type.

On Comparitive Sizes of Objects...

This is Boyfriend's favorite, and he requested that this one be posted:

One morning, Seven and I were eating breakfast together at the table. Each of us had milk and cereal, a banana, and a glass of orange juice.

Sev stuck her banana into her cup of orange juice. The banana was taller than the cup of orange juice, which apparently she was trying to fit it into. She took it out, looked at the banana disapprovingly, then looked at me and solemnly said, "This banana is too little for my coffees."

Lego Man vs. Hot Wheels.

We got the carpets professionally cleaned today. Since I had to remove EVERYTHING from Seven's bedroom floor anyway, we made it organize-toys day. We did a massive overhaul and sorted through every single little object in her room. This left all the little odds n' ends at the bottom of the toy box.

While I was sorting through the dress-up box, I heard her having a conversation. I snuck over there to look over her shoulder to see what she was doing. She was sitting there with a lego man (ethnicity: African American) in one hand, and a Hot Wheels Lamborghini in the other. But the funny thing was, the Hot Wheels was tipped up on its back end, and she was shaking it around as it spoke to indicate that it was talking. So the Lego man was talking to the under body of the car. The conversation went as follows:

Lego man: "Hi."
Hot Wheels: "How are you?"
Lego man: "I'm great. Can I have some food."
Hot Wheels: "NO!!"
Lego man (slowly backing away): ".....awwwwwwwww...."

Lego man comes back.

Lego man: "Can I have some food?"
Hot Wheels: "Sure. What would you like to eat?"
Lego man: "Ummmm.... peanut butter and jelly!"
Hot Wheels (bouncing away at the same rate as the words): "Bounce, bounce, bounce." (Hot Wheels stops, turns around, and bounces back to Lego man.) "Here you go!"
Lego man: "Oh, thank you!"

On the Benefits of Quality Dog Food.

 

This is our dog, Jack, when he's mid-sweater.

One of Seven's daily chores is to put food and water in our dog's bowl each morning. As I was sitting at my desk a moment ago, I realized that Sev was taking handfuls of Jack's dog food and placing them under my chair. Jack was under the desk by my feet, staring at Sev like, "wtf?"
I asked Seven what she was doing and that his food needed to stay in the bowl. "I'm putting Jack's food over here. He needs to eat. He needs more energy."

Statements About Baking.

We just made our weekly batch of Sunday-cookies. This week? Peanut butter. Sev loves to bake.

In order to bake peanut butter cookies, one must roll the dough into a ball and place on the cookie sheet. Seven tried this today for the first time, but ended up squishing it through her fingers and eating the dough, so rolling dough had become Mom's duty.

A couple batches later, she came into the kitchen while I was rolling up more dough to put on the baking sheets. "Can I do it?" she asked. I told her no, that Mom was going to take care of it. She looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes and said, "Awww.... but I love balls!!"

On Illnesses...

This was a completely unrelated-to-any-current-topic conversation Sev and I had while we were in the car running errands today:

Sev: "I puked."
Me: "You did?!"
Sev: "Yeah. I puked on the table."
Me: "Oh man, that sounds intense. Why did that happen?"
Sev: "I was sick. I was sick, but I ran out of boogers, so I puked on the table."

3-Year-Olds + Decorated Christmas Trees = uggghhh....

So, we decorated the tree last night, which is one of my favorite things in the world to do. I get to sit there, unwrapping all the ornaments from my 25 years on this earth, reminiscing about them all. One of my very, very favorites is my little light-up collectible Iron Man ornament. Dude's a badass, alright? Leave me alone.
Boyfriend made all sorts of fun for me for my Iron Man infatuation last night over the dang ornament. Whatever.
Sev made a big deal about the Iron Man ornament this morning. I re-hung it extra high on the tree because I knew she wanted to play with it. I told her that it wasn't a toy and not to touch it, that it's meant to hang on the tree.
Twenty minutes later, I'm folding laundry in the bedroom and I hear, "Mom! I broke Iron Man!" Okay, how the kid got this thing down is beyond me. But I walked into the living room to see my darling Iron Man laying on the floor, decapitated. Obviously I got mad. I asked what happened and how she managed to rip his little plastic head off. She said, "I broke him. I twisted his head off." Charming.
So she got scolded and sent to her room so I could cool off a little. She came out of her room a minute later and asked if I was mad. I said, "Yeah, just a little bit." Her response? "Mom, don't be mad and sassy."

The ______________ Suite. Fill in the Blank.

We were at Target trying to find a Christmas-ey doormat. As we walked the holiday aisles of the store, there was an entire shelf full of nutcrackers. You know... weird wooden soldiers with creepy goatees and gaping mouths? (ew...)

As we walked by, Sev gasped, pointed, and said, "Mom! Look! Those are... those... they are... there are a bunch of crack-nuts!"

The Timeout Diatribe.

Facts:
1. I went to class this afternoon.
2. My dad (a.k.a. "Papa") had taken Seven to a movie yesterday so I could work on finals. They saw the Muppets, if anybody's interested.

This afternoon, our sitter had put Seven in the timeout chair for not listening to the same instructions repeated three times. While in timeout, Sev said, "Mommy is lost but I did not lost her. She is lost at the whole outside because I did not listen to Papa for the movie and now she is so lost. Seven is sick... can I get out of timeout now?"

On Frustration...

Sometimes my mom will take Seven for an afternoon or evening to give me a break. One of their favorite things to do is just wander aimlessly through various stores just to kill time. One day at one of these stores, Sev had picked out a purple hula hoop with this sparkly, silver, tin foil-looking stuff wrapped around it. Grandma Dearest bought it and put it in the back seat for Seven to hold while she drove home. Seven was trying to pick off the silvery foil stuff, but I guess it was too tough for her to do. She asked Grandma to do it. My mom explained that she was driving. Seven tried again and got mad at the foil. She said, "DAMMIT! Now we're going to have to go back to Mom's house and get the snissors!"

On making sure everyone's hungry for dinner...

I made chicken for dinner (I guess I do that a lot). I was taking this gooey, cheesy, covered-in-herb-stuffing chicken out of the oven. Boyfriend was guarding Sev from the open, hot oven. She was tap dancing in excitement about the chicken while he held on to her arms to stop her from getting any closer. As she was dancing around, she was saying to Boyfriend, "I'm hungry. Are you hungry? Because I'm hungry. Hey, are you hungry? Hey. Hey! Are you hungry? Are you hungry, big guy?"

On the abundance of chicken for dinner...

I made chicken for dinner one night. I cut it into chunks for Sev's plate. She got two chunks on her fork at the same time, held her fork up in the air in a gesture of victory and exclaimed, "I can't believe it!! There's so much chicken in all my life!"

Seven's interpretation of a dog. Quite accurate.

Scapegoats.

Early one morning, about 4 a.m., Sev came into my room and woke me up, complaining that her bed was wet. I got up and started to change her sheets as she sleepily watched. She said, "I think Stevie peed in my bed." (Stevie is my mom's hermaphrodite dog-- no joke-- who happened to be over earlier that day) I said, "No, sweetpea. I don't think Stevie did this." She looked at me very matter-of-factly and said, "Oh, I must have spilled some water."

Normal Phone Conversations.

Seven likes to have pretend phone conversations with me where she'll "call" me from her small purple calculator and I'll talk into my hand. One particular morning, she "called" me while I was getting ready to go to class that day. On her phone, she asked where I was going. I told her that I was about to go to school. "Oh," she said. "I'm going to school, too. I'm going to scary school. There are ghosts in there and they're so much dangerous. Mmmmmm Hmmmmm... [insert extreme head nodding here], so much dangerous."

On the embarassment of singing in front of an audience...

Boyfriend and I were driving along one sunny afternoon with Sev in the back seat. I can't stand radio commercials, so that's pretty much the only time I'm willing to listen to the popular rap/R&B/pop station (ew). Seven immediately started singing the song that was on, word for word. I turned to look at her, and it was like she turned her own volume down and started to hum instead. We kept trying to sneak glances of her singing, but she'd only do it if we were turned away and were presumably paying attention to something else. She'd go from SINGING to a small, embarrassed hum each time we looked. I eventually just left her to hum, which gradually got louder, and louder, and louder, and then she said, "Hey Mom! Look! There's music in my mouth!"

The Gift of Persuasion.

This kid should be a lawyer. Or a con man. Or both.

These events occurred in two days, back-to-back.

1. Our sitter wasn't feeling well one day. Seven asked her what was wrong and she explained that her tummy hurt. Sev thought about it and said, "Oh. You must be sick. You need one bite of a cupcake and one sucker. ....*dramatic pause*... Seven's sick, too. Seven needs one bite of a cupcake and one sucker."

2. Sev woke up one morning and crawled into bed with me while I was being a lazy bum at 8 a.m. and was totally enthralled in this weird crap on the History Channel. She sat quietly for a moment next to me, and then started piping up about wanting to watch "Seven's tv" meaning Mickey Mouse, Little Einsteins, or whatever other CGI-created moderately educated junk she likes to watch. I told her that no, Mom was watching Mom tv and that she could wait to watch Seven tv. She sighed. Again, dramatic pause. Then she exclaimed, "OH! I almost got-for (which is her version of "forgot" and is probably the cutest expression ever) that I needed to watch Spongebob!" Oh, I see, so you forgot that you NEEDED to do something? Touche, little one. Touche.

On Ear Piercings, Santa Claus, and growing up.

Over breakfast, Seven and I were having a conversation about ear piercings. She wanted an explanation as to why Mommy and Birthday (Seven's name for Boyfriend) have ear holes, but she doesn't. I explained to her that once she gets a little bigger, she can get them. Just then, she held her arms out, dramatically staring at her belly and waist with a gaping mouth, yelling, "LOOK! I'm growing bigger! Mom!! Look! I'm getting bigger!" I asked her what she was doing and what that meant. She said, "I'm going to be Santa today. I'm going to ho-ho-ho today and then I'll get some ear holes!"

Seven on the topic of accidental tooting...

Seven and our long-term, lovely babysitter were having a tickle war. Seven let one rip. When our sitter asked what had happened, Sev said, "I had a hiccup in my mouth and toots in my butt. Is that cool?"

On cleaning up...

I got upset with Sev tonight for having to ask her multiple times (see: 2,458) to clean up the mess she had left on the office floor. She got in trouble for not listening and sent to her room multiple times because she refused to clean it up. Boyfriend came over shortly thereafter. She told him, "Mom got mad at me." Boyfriend asked why. "Because i didn't pick up my crap."