Mariah is Three!

Wait, wasn't it just like not that long ago that I was typing "Mariah is Two!" ??

Mariah was VERY excited about her birthday. She was telling everyone everywhere for the past few months, "Hi my name's Riah. I am 2 and a half and on Otober for-eff (fourth) it is my bert-day and I will be FREE (three) and den my daddy will BA-TIZE ME!!" then we have to remind her every time that she will get baptized when she's 8....she's still working out some of the details.
(if I had more time right now I'd go through and actually edit these pics...maybe later...)

So, leading up to her birthday, Mariah had a very specific vision for her birthday party. She started talking about it more and more as the big date approached. She wanted to eat oatmeal with her friends (most important thing) and put things in it (also important) and then have birthday cake (peripheral to the oatmeal, but still necessary) and party hats (obviously). Oatmeal with friends, we can do this. So we invited all her buddies over for a birthday breakfast on Saturday morning. We had a huge pot of oatmeal, with little bowls of berries, walnuts, shredded coconut, dried cranberries, spiced pumpkin seeds, and brown sugar and maple syrup to mix in. I also made mini veggie egg muffins, strawberries with honey yogurt, we had a big bowl of bagels from our favorite bagel shop. I was hoping this is what she had been envisioning.  We also made a big carrot cake (I've made it for her birthday for the past years also) and she made her very own smaller cake all by herself too and put whatever she wanted in it and we baked it. It was weird but she ate it so whatever.

Mariah's personal special blend cake. You almost can't tell it includes yogurt, oats, strawberries, pineapple, green peas, coconut oil, cinnamon, egg, coconut flour, baking powder, salt, maple syrup, blueberries, carrots, and almond milk.

 

 Still working on getting the three fingers up!

Eden takes 3 naps a day so she was in and out for the party fun, but she liked wearing the hat!

From Two Year Old Mariah

Mariah turning three seems like as good as occasion as any to dust off the ol blog!

I've been sort of writing down Mariah's little things as I write Rebecca every week, so I'll compile some of her stories here for now.

"Got-fer" = Forgot
"Younember when?" = Do you remember when?/aka the start of every other sentence
"Magic finding glass"= Magnifying glass

Sorry it seems like my stories are all about church or the potty. They are both hot topics around here.

"MOMMY! Jesus is coming to our house TONIGHT!!"

"He is?? We better get ready!"

"Yeah he's coming at five terty o cwock! When he gets here we will play chasing games! and run around and around! and play with my toys....Oh. wait.................Not Jesus....... Daddy. Daddy is coming home tonight."

I was trying to put Eden down for a nap and Mariah kept coming in and waking her up, so I asked her really seriously to wait outside and stop coming in. She said, "Mom, just choose to be happy! Like this!" (...and mimes wiping a smile across her face)

She took her "very very most special rock ever" that she'd been carrying around for two weeks, and dragged it in a big circle all the way around the perimeter of Matt's car. Huge scratch all over. NOT COOL. so we were kind of upset. When we got in the car to go we were just driving in silence. Mariah was like, "You guys. Sorry you are fwustwated because I did a big scratch on daddy's car. I can make it better. I just get two bandaids and a bucket and I can fix it....I can hear car now it saying, "I all better! I have a scratch but I starting to feel better!"

Mariah has been really in to loudly saying "pee pee" and "poo poo" everywhere we go (FYI these are terms she adopted from her buddies, not even the terms we initially used.) It is actually embarrassing. At home I generally try to ignore it so I don't draw attention and inadvertently  encourage it, but in public I really feel like I need to respond. So we were in Mystic Pizza, and we kept trying to distract her, and I was like, "let's talk about our favorite colors. I think right now mine is turquoise." And she said, "You mean your favorite color is POO POOS??!!" 

Then another day she was playing her princess maze game on the iPad and making up stories like this, "Once upon a time there was a little pee pee and a little poo poo..." And I was like, "You know what, princesses do not use potty words like that." And she said, "Oh, okay I will teach them! And she leaned into the iPad and put her mouth right up to the princess and said, "Just go like this!: pee pee poo poo pee pee poo poo!" 

This is a constant, constant battle. Sigh.

We had stake conference, and I was singing in the choir, and when we stood up to sing Mariah was like "GO HALEY!! GOOD JOB HALEY!!!! YAY HALEY!" And from what I heard people were like "Oh how cute is that her mom?" ....nope...just her friend's sister.... hahahah. And she spent the rest of conference making a congratulatory card for Haley. So cute hahah, but what am I, chopped liver? ;)

Yoga is basically her excuse for doing anything now like climbing on furniture she's like "I'm just doing yoga!!!! Namaste!!!!!

Likewise, whenever I ask her to quiet down from banging on things with toys or utensils she always says, "I'm just making beautiful music!"

I got a scrape on my ankle and Mariah said, "oh mom, that is NOT Cute."

During the sacrament prayer in Church Mariah loudly interjected, "and bless Eden to not pull my hair!!"

Mariah told me the other day, "I am so good at watching shows and eating things!" Glad I've set reachable goals for her. Good self esteem booster.

She was in the bath for a long time "decorating" with her toys and letters.
Her favorite toys right now are, predictably, all Eden's baby toys. She takes her plastic rings and strings them on the cabinet knobs, and when Matt got home she was like, "Wook! I decorated a party for you!!"

I should've known it was too quiet, when I walked in the bathroom to find a discolored smelly mass rapidly disintegrating in a pool of water in the baby bath tub in the sink. Mariah said "I just making a treasure hunt for Big Nutbrown Hare..."  He would have been so delighted to find a hundred mushy prenatal vitamins. Great. 

I said, "Please stop hammering the walls, I need you to be obedient." she told me, "I am NOT obedient I. AM. MA-RIAH."

In church as the sacrament started, I reminded Mariah to be quiet and reverent, and Mariah said loudly in her nicest sing song voice, "Mommy I am just thinking about JESUS!!" (She confuses nice voice with quiet voice)
"That's great Mariah can you do it quietly?"
"SURE! I WILL GO AND DO!! I WILL GO I WILL DOOOO!!"

When Eden made a loud baby sound the other day, Mariah said, "Eden, stop, you sound like a boy."

Was trying to get Mariah down for a nap and she said, "It's not sleep time, it's not nap time, it's not rest time, it's not sit or stand in my crib time, I will stay awake FOREVER!!! For very long YEARS!!!"

We had breakfast at the farm (amazing) then played with the goats. After standing around them talking for awhile, she said, "Mom they are not understanding me!!"

At the first week of Joy School, all the kids learned the rules, which included a song that goes, "We never hit or kick or push our friends at nursery school..."

When I asked Mariah how Joy School went another day she said, "We never hit or kick or push...unless Lucy pinches and then you push her...."

When she was drumming with her fork on the table I reminded her that forks are for eating and if she wasn't going to eat I would need to take her fork. She said, "Mom, younember we don't take things from people."

She is extremely principled. She knows what the rules in the house are and (despite the fact that she seems to willfully/gleefully test the boundaries often) she makes sure we are all in line. all the time.

If I do anything that she interprets as being abnormal she asks me questions like, "Mama why you do this with your eyes??" [then does a dramatically long blink] or "Why did you look fast over there? like this?" [and mimics the way that I looked out the car window] or if I hum under my breath, I get, "Why you make a sound like this? DOOO DOO DOOOOO?"

So, that's been Mariah the last few months! Entertaining, exhausting, challenging, but, as always, full of life and teaching me constantly.