The Lone Rearranger

Paloma's favorite thing to do is read books. Her favorite book is still Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I've even heard her saying the words from it in the middle of the night to herself in her crib.
But her next favorite thing to do besides read books is to spread them all over the place. She likes them to cover the floor. I am not kidding.

Now all of you know I love books, and I have them in every room, but I like them on shelves and in baskets, and believe it or not, ORGANIZED. I like to be able to put my hands on whatever book comes to mind at the appropriate time. And I like to treat them nicely. Apparently I have not passed on these traits to my youngest child yet. But at least she loves books.

She is starting to remind me of Sally, as in When Harry Met Sally. For example, today she said, "I unt a drink of water with ice in it, please." She often asks for Chockat Milk, Mommy Milk, or MACH (her code word for my milk since she was tiny). I'm afraid she might have picked up on another word for that from Stacy when she was here last week, too.

Earlier this week, she was pretending to talk on a cell phone (as usual) and she said, "Gigi is so big!" (This is to be taken as a compliment, since that's what Gigi says to the girls all the time!)

Another funny thing she's been doing lately is naming things she likes to eat or drink, getting us to repeat her, then saying, "Great idea!" as if we've offered those things.

Her curious/ mischevious streak is evident lately:

• We did a 500 piece Looney Toons puzzle the other day--well 499 pieces, because she ran off with some and now one is still missing.
• She has liked to empty containers for a long time and there's no end in sight, I'm afraid.
  
• She is unfortunately STILL interested in my makeup.
• She's become interested in putting things in toilets (we never had to put locks on them with the other two).
• She often takes the flash card adapter out of the computer and runs off with it (pretending it's a cell phone).
• She colored on the (off-white carpeted) stairs with a red crayon. (She LOVES to color & draw just like Carmen did. "I color!")
• She colored on the beige recliner with yellow Sharpie.
  
• Here she is saying "So Big!" so I could show you how she colored her HANDS.

When I was trying to get my classroom ready for summer school, I had to take her with me a couple of times.

While the other two were happy to watch a DVD and play with beanbags, Paloma prefered to take the potted plant Gabe gave me for Mother's day to the back of the classroom, push it off a desk, and spread the potting soil around on the floor.


While I was cleaning that up, she went to my desk where I'd been sorting papers and cleared it off with one swipe of her arm and said, "I cweaning!"

And this is how she reacted when I removed her from that mess.

That is sooo gross. The floor is cleaned only once a year. I'm not kidding. It gets a light sweep every other day during the year, but mopped and waxed only once a year in the summer, and obviously that hasn't happened yet!

When we went to get Carmen's hair cut, she ran from one shelf of styling products to the other taking things off and moving them around. The people in the salon laughed since she was obviously putting on a show. When I finally cleaned up enough behind her and caught her to restrain her, she started screaming.

This morning I handed her two small pieces of trash and asked her to put them in the trash. I laughed later when I found them in Gabe's toy garbage truck.

She also now likes to summarize a meal, for example after Luby's (kids eat free) Wednesday night, she bragged to me in the car:

"Mommy feed me potatoes. Daddy feed me nanas. Daddy feed me stawBERies. Daddy feed me I-keem."

I say bragged because she held out for the fruit & dessert and David gave in. She said all this when I took her to the car so the others could finish.

She is still normally a good eater, but she LOVES breakfast the most. In the mornings, she will eat breakfast with each person separately as they wake up if we let her. She likes to talk about breakfast before she goes to sleep: "Butter Crunch!" Our friend Amy asked her the other day if "Butter Crunch" was her favorite, and she responded, "Cheerios!"

I've been saving this post for weeks because I wanted to put in more pictures, but I'm going to go ahead and publish now and maybe add pics as I find them.