Sixty Months of Preschooler Frances

Birthday mornings around our house:

Frances's birthday was fairly casual.  I did send cupcakes to school, but this school doesn't make a big to-do about birthdays the way her Montessori preschool did - understandable, but a little sad.  After school, she had ballet class with her good buddy Darby.  For dinner, Frances requested white noodles and chicken, and I aim to please.

Last year, I interviewed Frances on her birthday for the first time.  I was amused and fascinated with her answers so I thought I'd give it another go.  She was a little hesitant at the start, but became more forthcoming towards the end.

Without further ado...

• What's your whole name?  "Frances Upton." [Same answer as last year; technically her whole name is Frances Elliott Upton.]
• How old are you?  Frances: "Four."  Mark:  "You're not four, you're five."  Frances:  "Oh, five." [Apparently the birthday party didn't make a big impression.]
• Where do you live? "Boston." [The distinction between Jamaica Plain and Boston is lost on her, but it's lost on many.]
• What's your mom's name?  "Morgan." [I'll be so pleased when she learns my last name.  Maybe next year.]
• How old is your mom?  "Um, I'm not sure.  I'm not sure, mommy."  [Last year, she guessed I was sixty, so this year's confusion is an improvement.]
• What's your mom's favorite thing to do?  "Um, play with me?"  [Aww, so sweet and innocent.]
• What do you like your mom to do?  "Uh, um, clean up the house?" [Mark loved this answer.  I will start looking for paid employment tomorrow.]
• What's your dad's name?  "Mark" [Mark Elliott Upton would also have sufficed.]
• How old is your dad?  "Uh, I'm not sure." [Last year she just asked Mark how old he was.]
• What is daddy's favorite thing to do? "I'm not sure." [Last year she said, "Draw with me."  This year's answer does not inspire confidence.]
• What does daddy like to eat?  "Sandwiches?" [She's not wrong.]
• What does daddy do at work?  "He draws buildings on paper and then his mates at work they build the structure that he drawed." [Mark thinks she means "classmates."  She hasn't picked up any Australian lingo.]
• What do you like to do with Daddy? "Play peek-a-boo."  [Mark and I estimate it has been between two and four years since they've played peek-a-boo, but we'll try not to split hairs.]
• What is your sister's name? "Chandler." [Chandler Hayward Upton, if we're being precise.]
• What does your sister like to do?  "I think she likes to play with me." [Chandler adores playing with Frances; she lives to play with Frances.]
• What do you like to do with your sister?  "Play with my toys together." [Actually, one of Frances's favorite things to do with Chandler is hang out in Chandler's crib.  They make forts.  I can get twenty minutes of cleaning in when they're in a fort-building mood.]
• Who do you live with? "My sister, Chandler; my Morgan; and Mark Upton." [Yes.]
• What's your favorite food? "Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and pepperoni."  [She has never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I try to feed them to her occasionally.  She may take half a bite, but she never fails to tell me that she doesn't like it.  Sigh.]
• What don't you like to eat?  "I don't like to eat rolls of hot dogs, because I don't really like bread that just had food in it."  [There's some truth coming out."
• What's your favorite color? "Green, orange, yellow, blue, purple, pink, red and silver and black." 
• What makes you happy? "Playing with my toys.  What was the question again?  Playing peek-a -boo and hide and seek."  [She actually spends a fair bit of time pretending to be a horse or Pegasus.  I lost track of her at a playground about a month ago.  Just as I was starting to get really nervous about her whereabouts, I spotted her at the far end of the playground.  She was flapping her arms for all she was worth and swiveling her neck around, which is how Frances imitates Pegasus.]
• What makes you sad? "I get sad when I have to go in my room.  That's it." [She most frequently gets sent to her room when she fails to listen to me.  It makes us all sad."
• What do you dream about at night?  "I dream all different kinds of stuff."  [She recently told me about dreaming of aliens that were spraying poisonous goo.  She was very upset about it.  I was very upset hearing about it.  How did she come up with that?]
• What's your favorite thing to do? "Go to school.  I love choice time.  You get to pick whatever you want when your name comes out of the little blue bucket.  Always my name is comes off last."  [She may be exaggerating about that last bit.]
• What's your favorite toy?  "My Elsa doll and my Cinderella doll.  That's it.  And jewelry."
• What's your favorite animal?  "Butterflies and ponies and giraffes and gorillas.  I love gorillas.  And unicorns."  [The ponies and giraffes don't surprise me, but I've never heard her mention gorillas.  We do visit them at the zoo, but she seemed much more interested in the fruit bats.]
• What's your favorite book?  "Where The Wild Things Are.  I just like the wild things."  [I would like this to be true, but it's also possible she was just trying to please me on this one.]
• What is your favorite song?  "Twinkle." [And then she sang "Twinkle, twinkle, little star."]
• What is your favorite game? "There's a different game I know but it was at a store.  It's a matching game.  It's a really easy matching game.  There's ponies.  It's really easy peasy lemon squeezy.  You find any pony you want.  But they're not My Little Ponies." [If anyone comes across a pony matching game, but not a My Little Pony matching game, please let me know.]
• What is your favorite thing to do at school?  "Do puzzles and stuff like that."
• What do you want to be when you grow up?  "A mom and a ballet teacher."  [She told me I was a great mom the other day.  It about brought me to tears.]

Twenty-One Months of Toddler Chandler

Oh, what I wouldn't give for these photos to be in focus!

My Lord, she's a cutie.

Twenty-One Month Fun Facts

• Firsts - I just remembered that on Frances's monthly updates, I always kept track of her Firsts.  This month, Chandler had her first trip to New York.  So she's been in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Arkansas, Maine and New York?  Is that all?  We need to get moving.
• Language - Huge language explosion.  Let's see, we've got:...Never mind, we've got nothing.  I was keeping a list on my phone and the list has disappeared.  One of my horrible offspring probably erased it.  Drat.  Take my word for it, Chandler's vocabulary has exploded.  Some words include ball, shoes/dues, green/gree, tree/ree, more/mo, Gladys (Chandler's caretaker at the gym's nursery), Mimi, doggie, Scarlett/carlett (the upstairs neighbors' dog), snack/nack, baby, water/baba (?), help me/hep me, and go.  She frequently says, "Daddy wok choo choo" which means either "Daddy walks to the train" or "Daddy went to work on the train."  Horses say, "neigh."  Cows say, "moo."  Cats "meow."  There are other words, I know.  I wouldn't swear that we're absolutely up to the ideal two-year old word count, but we must be close.  I'm not worried.
• Favorite book: "Little Blue Truck," by Alice Schertle.  It's got truck noises and animal noises, so it really can't be beat.
• Favorite song: I'm allowed to sing her "Irene, Goodnight" before bed, but I get shut down if I try to sing anything else at any time.  She's a pisser.  She's also fond of repeating some tones from a singing class we're taking together.  I'm sure this means she's destined to be a great chorister.
• Sleep: She went through a brief period of sleeping through the night, and then stopped again.  I can't figure out if she's a little sick, or teething or cold or if she's just pulling our leg.  When I figure it out and address the issue, we will sleep train yet again.  It's not hopeless; sometimes she sleeps through the night just to keep me on my toes.
• Mobility: She'll take Frances's scooter, thank you very much.  She spent much of today scootering around the apartment and she's getting quite fast.  The downstairs neighbor loves us.  Chandler does even steep stairs independently, which is great sometimes, but sometimes scares the bejeezus out of me.
• Frequent comment: Anything about her blue eyes.  I've gotten one "She's so tall!" but only one, and I'd be happy if it stayed that way (I had that conversation too many times about Frances.)
• Disposition: Sometimes, she is the sweetest thing on two feet - handing out snuggles and sharing with Frances like a sweetheart.  Sometimes, she hisses.  I think she's hysterical.

Life could be worse

After Frances's ballet class one Friday, Chandler wanted to put on a ballet costume as well.  Luckily, we have many, many ballet get-ups.

And then this happened...

If I have any sense at all, I will now die a happy woman.

Ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night

We are very blessed to have Frances's friend Darby in our lives.  They don't go to school together anymore, but we are holding on to that kid.  One good thing about her?  Her birthday is on Halloween, so we always have a Halloween strategy in place.  This year, Darby's brave mother took Darby, Frances and Kealakai to get their nails painted, then to ballet, and then back to their house.  We all convened for trick-or-treating and dinner.  Here's some pre-trick-or-treating chaos:

Frances had originally asked to be a fairy princess, but she also asked for an Elsa dress.  I didn't want to push her into being Elsa, but I didn't want her to be disappointed with a non-Elsa costume when she realized so many other girls were Elsa, so I got the dress and let her choose.  She chose Elsa, big surprise.  I thought she looked great.

And then there's little Miss Butterfly.

I'll admit it: I didn't work very hard on Chandler's costume.  But the trick-or-treating happened so long after her bedtime, that she was kind of a wreck and I carried her inside my jacket the whole night anyway.  I was glad I hadn't slaved over a costume.  I'll try harder next year, if Chandler bumps back her bedtime, I promise.  (Do I say this every year?)

Jack, Jack, Jack-o-Lantern

The day before Halloween, we hadn't yet carved our pumpkins.  Time to gather the kids and get out the knives!

It was our first time using white pumpkins, and our first time using fake candles.  I wasn't excited about the fake candles - they were dim and didn't create that lovely burning pumpkin aroma - but the kids had a great time carrying around their finished jack-o-lanterns and showing them off to Dad.

A most beautiful photo fail

For months, we had been planning to meet our friends, Beka, Dan and offspring, at the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival and all spend the night in Claverack, New York, at the home of some other friends.  Well then, poor Frances gets a dreadful fever and takes the week off school.  No Sheep and Wool Festival for Frances.  Mark volunteered to stay in Massachusetts with Frances and Chandler and I headed to New York.

The festival was fascinating until it got too crowded for words.  Those knitters can swarm.  I couldn't even be bothered to take pictures while navigating the crowds with Chandler.   Fortunately, there were still some photographs worth taking when we got to Claverack.  The first photo is the view from the back of the house...

...And here's the view out the front.

Not too shabby, eh?  Chandler was impressed.  She had a lovely time marching around.

Luckily, Beka has all sorts of schemes to invite ourselves back on a very regular basis.  I'm sure we need to see it in the snow, for instance.  Perhaps there are horse-drawn sleighs nearby?  There will be many more chances for photos, I hope, I hope.

Found Photos

Mark must have taken these, so I'm not sure what was going on...

...Practicing showing that Frances is almost five?

I'm just relieved the bed got made.

For the love of a good book

Getting through Sunday

Chandler fell asleep in the car on the way home for church, which means a very short nap and no joy in Whoville.  Rather than hanging around the house with a cranky pre-two year old, I took the girls out to Drumlin Farm.

Lucky, lucky me.  I love this place.  I feel like a better mom every time we come.

The girls were surprisingly entertained by bins of dirt.  They seemed to like the tools.  If only we had room for dirt bins at home...

There were rabbits to pat in the garden.  Frances had a long chat with the rabbit presenter.

We spent a very long time in the cow and horse barn, mostly in a room with horse and pony displays.  Frances's favorite part was a child-sized stall.  She loved pretending to be a horse.  After a good twenty minutes of neighing, stamping and cantering around, she discovered the horse/pony ruler on the wall.  Much to her chagrin, she is still pony sized.

Chandler was patient with all this horse play for awhile, then she started wandering outside the barn and investigating on her own.  I love that about her.

On our way out, the girls picked out some white pumpkins and I treated myself to some patchouli-scented goats' milk soap.  It was a good, good day.

Fifty-Nine Months of Preschooler Frances

Fifty-Nine Months Fun Fact:

• Imagination:  Frances tells me that her (invisible) friend Ada has a cousin.  This cousin has eleven fingers!  I've been told the richer the kid's imagination, the smarter the kid.  Thank goodness.