Four!

 Lilly is a four year old.  Holy smoke, as she would say.  As I look back at Greta's tricks, I realize it is hard to write a post for a four year old, the tricks aren't quite as obvious.  I am going to try though.

Her stats at her check up:
Weight - 34 pounds (50th percentile)
Height - 3 Feet 5 inches (75th percentile)
Her weight-for-stature percentile just above 50th, which is her strongest showing yet, most of her other dots are 25th percentile and below.  She's still our string bean!

Tricks:
-Can recognize a handful of words
-Can write all of her letters independently and recognizes all of them (all caps, some lower case), and recognizes numbers 0-9.
-Can donkey kick (This is important to her)

Princess Leia, Darth Vader and the stuff in the top center - music notes
of the Death March.  Side note - she's never seen any Star Wars.  Power of peer influence!

-Her drawings are actually starting to look like things and are pretty well done.  Somedays her cubby at Tree Top is bursting with drawings.
-Sleeps through the night but takes anywhere from 15-90 minutes to fall asleep, singing to herself, making silly sounds until she passes out.
-Naps are hit or miss, becoming more miss than hit.  We recently learned she doesn't take great naps at day care.  Apparently if they have a staff meeting during nap time, Lilly doesn't nap, but rather listens in on the staff meeting.

Listening to a story with a giant cup of hot chocolate

Books are by far her favorite thing on the planet.  We went out to dinner with Nick's parents last weekend and Dianne was reading to Lilly at the table.  It was so fun to watch Lilly's face as she was being read to.  The girl takes everything in on the page.  Her brow furrows as she tries to make sense of the story, she looks at every piece of the illustration before moving on.  She's beginning to ask more questions while we read, and if you stop to ask her to make predictions, she starts to make predictions that make sense.  She will sit and page through books for hours and always wants us to read to her.  We've even started reading short chapter books with illustrations on every few pages and she absorbs everything in those too.  So far we've tackled: Ralph S Mouse, Runaway Ralph, and Ramona Quimby, Age 8.  We also read 90% of Mr. Popper's Penguins but she refused to hear the rest of the story once Mr. Popper was going to go to jail.  Even when I read the ending first and informed her he does get out of jail, the damage had been done.

Lilly is obsessed with the TV show Octonauts.  Utterly obsessed.  It is the main imaginary game we play.  Take Saturday for example - from 6:50-12:15 this is what she did: painted for about 5 minutes, played Octonauts until breakfast, listened to a few stories, played Octonauts inside, went outside and played Octonauts.

Izzy swabbing the deck

Her imagination is remarkable and frustrating.  Rarely is Lilly ever just Lilly.  She is often Rudolph, an Octonaut (usually either Tweak, Dashi, or Tunip), or Princess Alice.  Santa gave her name tags for Christmas, so we often write who she is on those before sending her to day care.  When she first started pretending to be someone else, we'd get snapped at when we would call her Lilly.  Now, she politely says, "You mean (fill in the blank with her persona)?"  We are also all involved in these imaginary worlds and have new personas every day too.  One day at day care while she was getting ready to go, one of her friends said, "Goodbye Lilly."  Lilly said, "I"m not Lilly, I'm Rudolph."  Then Rudolph went off to get the next article of clothing to put on and I said to Kennedy, "It is hard to keep track of who she is, isn't it?' and Kennedy enthusiastically nodded her head in agreement.

Playing by herself is not her strong suit.  She is always wanting us to play with her and will even have meltdowns because no one can play with her.  However, there are times where she will play independently for long stretches of time.  So she's capable, but she certainly prefers company.  We had friends over Saturday night and Haley asked Lilly what kinds of things can she do now that she is four.  Lilly informed Haley that she can play by herself now.  I held my tongue.

Her birthday celebrations:

The weekend before her birthday Grandma and Grandpa Robertson came to celebrate (and clean our house on Friday while we were at work.  AWESOME).  They took her to Culver's and the bookstore. After dinner on Saturday she opened her presents from them.  Before bed she helped Grandma make fudge, which she wanted for her birthday instead of birthday cake or cupcakes.

Posed photo - not too bad!

Vegimals from the Octonauts.  Awesome (for her) She also got some
early reader books and a book light

Making fudge

She wanted Tim and Elizabeth (our friends) to come over for her birthday.  Tim is a pilot and needed to drive down to the Twin Cities on her actual birthday, so they came over the night before.  We made pizzas and salad, they brought cupcakes.  Lilly played with them, Greta watched with this look of "what in the world are they doing" on her face.  Per usual, towers were built and destroyed (this summer Tim and Elizabeth started using the words saboteur and sabotage while knocking down towers.  Recently Lilly called Greta a saboteur when she knocked over a tower of rice puffs.  Nicely done, Tim and Elizabeth!).  We had a near tragedy - no birthday candles.  Luckily she was okay with us lighting a regular candle for her to blow out.

Wearing the crown they made her for her third birthday

Elizabeth, Lilly, Tim - the 38 year-old best friends of a four year old

On her actual birthday, she awoke to fours hanging on the walls all around the house.  Nick's brother Ben and his family do this for their kids' birthdays - put up numbers of the age of the kids all around the house.  Such a simple thing but Lilly loves it.  I love that I have students who love to help and are willing to make the numbers for us.  So two of the three students in my 9th grade study hall spent two days making fours for Lilly (they were passing all classes and had no homework!).  She opened one present, the one that came in the mail on Saturday and she patiently waited to open.   She also chose to wear her Christmas dress, also known as her party dress.

Opening the perfect present from Grandma Phyllis

Lilly had asked us the week before to come to her birthday party at Tree Top.  They usually have birthday treat at 10:00, while I have class.  Nick was going to go for sure, I was going to try and figure out a way to get coverage.  Luckily I teach in an amazing department and the junior/senior English teacher took the last few minutes of my third hour class and my fourth hour class (luckily the same small, wonderful, thoughtful, quiet group of students) so I could buzz over for her party.  It was great fun watching all her friends give her the pictures they drew for her and wish her a happy birthday.  Then they sang to her, she blew out candles, and then everyone enjoyed the Culver's custard we brought.  My favorite moment: Lilly's friends at her table asked why she wasn't eating her ice cream yet.  She informed them she was waiting for everyone to have their ice cream, at this table and the other table.  What a thoughtful kiddo!!

So happy!

They do such a great job making the kid's birthdays special.

That night we did a short FaceTime with my parents and she opened her presents from them.  She then opened the present from us and our plansfod going out to dinner were squashed.  We got her a toy Octopod to go with her Octnauts and she loves, loves, loves it. We are already sick of it, but happy it brings her so much joy.  Lilly said she'd be fine with anything for dinner, just nothing with tomatoes, potatoes, or onions in it.  She then suggested tacos (she eats these sans tomatoes) but we didn't quite have all the ingredients.  Nick then suggested we order pizza from the Alley, he'd get what we need for tacos Thursday night and then pick up the pizza.  So that's what we did.  Then celebratory birthday fudge.

"What do I see? What do I see? What do I see?" with increasing
excitement.  Very fun to watch.

Best toy ever

Candle didn't fit on a tiny piece of fudge, so we stuck it in Play Doh

That wasn't quite the end of the birthday celebrations.  Sunday her friend Alma and her family came over for birthday brunch.  We had French toast and fruit and the kiddos topped it off with some chocolate cake.  We're pretty lucky that we really like Alma's parents, the girls are best friends, and the older siblings tolerate hanging out with the little ones.

Wearing their day care birthday crowns

Phew!  I have been working on this post for a few days now (I actually started it before her fourth birthday) and here it is Sunday night, finishing it up as I am in bed.  I think that's all I have to share, if not, I will do another post with more fun facts about Lilly's fourth birthday.  All we know is that she cracks us up, she's a very empathetic young girl, a great big sister, and we love her to pieces.