Julia is enjoing the delights of emptying all the DVDs from their cases. This is one of the things you have to thank your big sister for. Julia believes that she has the right to get into the drawer that Emily gets into. She just hasn’t learned the maturity to go with that freedom.

Here is to a great day with my girls!

(3 years) A day doesn’t go by that I notice Emily doing something new. She has started to communicate at a different level and loves to pretend in play and conversation. I thought the changes at age 2 were significant, but age 3 has brought even more. She loves to notice things and points them out. She has been pointing out all signs that have symbols like Robby’s car does. She will say, that is like Daddy’s car. She just started doing the same for my car and last night pointed out the symbol from her Grandpa’s car and said “that’s like Pa-Pa’s car”. I thought this was astounding because we haven’t see Pa-Pa’s car since fall. We also discussed the shapes of clouds and she told me that the cloud she was looking at looked like a sidewalk.

(18 months) Julia is starting to assert herself. She tells Emily with screams and squeals when she doesn’t want to be touched (which is just about all the time). When Emily is not with us, she is quick to request to ride in Emily’s carseat with a please and impassioned pointing. She expresses a lot of displeasure yesterday at having to wait for her bath while Emily had a turn to take hers first. She put a puzzle together matching all the pieces to the spots; even though, we don’t spend much time working on that. The pieces didn’t fit up, but I was pleased she took the interest to put it together. I loved watching Julia try to sit in Emily’s lap the other day. She kept backing up and plopping down in Emily’s lap and then while Julia would get situated Emily would move and Julia would do it again.

I can only imagine what they will do tomorrow that will astound me.

Julia has a new view on life – a forward facing one. We spent some time at the car wash/vacuum cleaning the car, playing, and turning her carseat around. The time has gone fast, but I’m not too sad about this change. She was so pleased with the new direction of her seat and the car feels so much bigger with the seat in it’s new position. She liked it enough to fall asleep in the seat as we drove home.

We had a real picnic of goldfish. The girls were so good to share and take turns. They loved the idea of a snack picnic. I’m surprised they haven’t asked to have another one. There was a little dress-up play before our snack – the jewels and tutu were just leftovers. Fun, fun, fun!!

Emily’s favorite new game is to play picnic. She packs a ‘cooler’ with items and then carrries it to a blanket she has put out. She then opens up the cooler and starts to put out her lunch. Sometimes she invites others to join her. She decides what people are going to eat and assists them with condiments. It has been fun to watch. Julia loves going to the picnics too and helping to unpack the cooler when her sister lets her.