Forty-One Months of Preschooler Frances

The weather has finally warmed up enough that I'm willing to take Frances to the playground.  It's been a long time and we've been visiting it a lot lately.

Frances was very pleased with herself for constructing a building.  Preschool modernist?

Forty-One Month Fun Facts

• Frances's Mispronunciations: She still gets tripped up by R's sometimes, so we get "tomollow" for "tomorrow."  And for some reason "yesterday" sounds more like "lunchtoday."  I can't explain that one.
• Frances on Human Reproduction: She's got some funny ideas, that Frances Upton.  A few times now, she has asked us if we ever lived in someone's mouth.  I think this comes from believing that babies come from their mommys' tummies.  I asked her what she thought it would be like to live in someone's mouth.  "Tomato," she said.  Once, she asked if we'd ever lived in someone's foot.  More of the same, I guess.  She has also offered to start nursing again to see what it was like.  I explained that nursing was for Chandler now, but asked her what she thought nursing was like.  "Strawberry," she said.  So, human reproduction and produce have a lot more in common than I ever knew.  Frances also asked when Daddy's baby was coming.  I told her that Daddy wasn't going to be having a baby.  It may have been my imagination, but I think she looked relieved.
• Frances's Triumph:  Several months before Chandler was born, Frances's bedtime routine really came off the rails.  For over a year, she had fallen asleep by herself.  Suddenly, she was "afraid from the dark" and required Mark or me to sit with her while she fell asleep.  When we tried to extract ourselves from the room, Frances would breakdown in panic - tearful, screaming panic.  I became one of those mothers that sits by their kids for up to 45 minutes every night, waiting for them to fall asleep.  Some mothers enjoy this; I did not.  I considered just leaving her, but then would think of Jane Eyre locked in that red room as a child, terrified and alone (because it's best to leave parenting decisions up to Charlotte Bronte, don't ya know?).  I considered starting a sticker chart with her (one sticker for every night she went to sleep without us) but believed it would be pointless, thinking that surely a sticker wasn't incentive enough for her to overcome her terror. I knew some of the "panic" was really drama, but I thought it was mostly real.  But we grew desperate.  I bought many, many stickers, got out an extra calender, and explained to Frances how it was going to work.  She hasn't looked back.  She's earned a sticker every night since we started.  I stopped even bothering discussing the chart with her after about a week.  She just didn't need it any more.   Oh, how I wish we'd done this two months ago.