The Likes and Dislikes of Bee at 3-years-old.

I started a tradition with Gracie’s birthday; I had meant her birthday letter to mark her likes and dislikes, accomplishments and quirks, but found myself gushing instead about how my life rose and set with her. Funnily enough, the same thing happened with Bee. It’s so darn tough when you love your children so much. So here you go: my Bee Baby’s 10 most favoritest things ever, and 10 things she never, not ever wants to ever hear of again.

 

Ten Things Bee Loves:

1. Hopping. It’s her dearest love right now. The kid will hop anywhere and everywhere. Seriously. It is physically, mortally impossible for her to walk sedately anywhere at all. I think she’s half bunny rabbit.
2. Singing. Particularly, she loves singing “I’m smushing up a baby bumble-beeeeeee…” and Wheels on the Bus and Five Little Ducks. She sings along with some of the grown-up songs on the radio, but Bee is happily still a kid at heart.
3. Chocolate. We are all food lovers and appreciators of fine chocolate at my house, but Bee really lurrrrves her some chocolate. To her, it’s the deity of all things food – the way it’s meant to be.
4. Waking up early. This one hurts me deep in my heart. Bee used to be my baby (erm…toddler) who would go to bed at 6:30 p.m. and sleep until 9:00 a.m. if I let her. Her wake-up time sloooowly crept backward until 8:30, then 8 a.m. Then 7 a.m., and now she’s springing awake at 6 a.m. The kid would be up even earlier if I let her. For the love of sleep, child, GO BACK TO BED! You will thank me when you’re a teenager.
5. Cheese. She would trade me for cheese. She would trade years off her life for cheese. She would learn to read and write just so she could write a book about how much she loves cheese. True story.
6. Babies and purses and all things girly. This is funny to me because you are not a girly-girl. You are mischievous and a tomboy and dirt and mayhem. But you will play for hours with your baby dolls, holding them on your hip and “shhh-ing” them as you rock back and forth, or feeding them pretend food. You find a purse and fill it with jewels, phones, blocks, or really whatever is handy and then cart them around. (Heaven help the person who tries to get between you and your purse.) Entire afternoons you’ll spend with all of these facets of your version of playing house. Even better, you usually include your sister in your pretend-play and I love to watch the two of you weave magically mundane stories around your pretend families.
7. Turning my hair gray. You jump up and down on the couch and can’t figure out how I know you’re doing it when I’m in the next room. (The springs squeak, silly.) You pull your bed out from the wall and jump from your bed to your sister’s when you’re supposed to be going to sleep – and don’t even have the grace to look guilty when I catch you! You fall down constantly, dangle perilously from chairs, and whack your head quite often again any hard surface nearby (usually the coffee table). I don’t know who you’re going to kill first – you or me from sheer fright!
8. Whining. Please, oh please let this be a short-lived phase. For the past few months, you’ve refused to use your words to tell me what’s wrong. You whine. Or cry. Or both, while moaning my name. I’m partly to blame, I know. I enable you by guessing what’s wrong. Then nothing will fix it but a long hug, a kiss, and a some soothing words from Mommy. But this stops now, you hear? I am not running off to college to fix your boo-boos.
9. Band-aids. You will invent boo-boos just to get a band-aid. I have had to use the words, “You’re not bleeding; you don’t get a band-aid,” in an attempt to reason with you. I just love the added bonus of giving you a goal to work up to.
10. Being silly. Silly narrowly beat out mischievous as Bee’s Top Quality. Bee will tell you she is “Gwacie” not Bee, or that your dirty clothes go “on da cei-wing fan” when I ask if they belong on the floor. I love the glint she gets in her eyes when she know she is asking for trouble. God, I love this happy-go-lucky kid.
    

Ten Things Bee Hates, Hates, Hates with the Passion of 1,000 Fiery Suns:

1. Being told no. I should amend that – sometimes she does fine. But if she really isn’t in the mood, she ain’t kidding. She will enact her go-go-gadget spaghetti legs and collapse to the floor, crying and whining faster than you can even blink. Really, she should rethink that strategy because then I can’t give in.
2. Hot dogs. I don’t know what it is about it, because Bee used to live on hot dogs and their predecessor, Vienna Sausages. Now she won’t even take a bite. She will tell you she likes them, though, just to lick off the ketchup (and ask for more).
3. Waking up 15 minutes earlier than she normally would have (you know – at the crack of dawn) to go to school. “Seep! Seeeeeep, Mommy!” she begs. Dahling, I’d love to let you sleep in – Lord knows I loathe getting up early to go to work – but this is just how life is. So just SLEEP IN ON THE WEEKENDS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Ahem.
   
4. Spiders or bugs. This is a weird one. Sometimes she is fascinated with them, like the grasshopper on the floor at Gate C-42 in Baltimore that kept the girls busy for 20 minutes straight. (God bless you, tiny grasshopper, wherever you now are.) But if a bug flies too closely to her, or heaven forbid a spider is spotted and she isn’t in a random spider-whacking mood, her shrieks will split your eardrums and the terror on her face is unmistakable.
5. Going to bed. I’ve gone on and on throughout the blog about the girls’ Up-And-Down Bedtime Brigade. Bee is clearly the captain of that team. She wails – loudly – from her bed for sometimes up to an hour. She gets up again and again. She tells me a “spy-door” is in there near the window. (“No, I put all the bugs outside.” “Out-side?” “Yes. What do we tell the bugs?” “Go AWAY! Leave me ‘lone!” “Or? “Or I ‘moosh you dead!”) She’s really shaken when we have to do the Bug Banishing Incantation. That one is a real fear. But I have my suspicions this bedtime thing is a ploy to manipulate mommy.
6. Being left out. Bee is furious that she isn’t going to kindergarten in the fall. She insists she can read like her sister. And that she knows her letters. The problem is…
7. She hates any attempts to help or teach her something. She thinks she already knows how to write the letter “B” or spell her name or any manner of things. Except wiping her butt. That she still insists on Mommy helping her with.
8. Watching TV. She loves her some “See-er-ella” (who used to be called the much cuter “Rella-ella.” You’ve probably correctly translated that back to Cinderella, her one true Disney love). It’s the only television show or movie Bee will sit still for. Maybe I can get her to sit still for Sesame Street or music (the girls love them some of Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park), but Bee is fickle if it’s anyone other than See-er-ella.
9. Getting out of the tub first. Good lord, the fights I go through over something like who has to get out of the tub first. I have to make up wacky rules like whoever washes their hair first (also a fight) get to stay in longer, or whoever misbehaved at dinner has to get out first. And really, it’s like a bonus of 30 seconds! The only other fight I listen to more often is who gets to be line leader.
10. When I call her my baby. Oooh, she gets ugly. And defiant. It’s like I called her a Yankees-lover or a Cheesehead or something.”No I NOT!” she’ll yell, eyes blazing. But that’s okay. Pretty soon she and her sister will be fighting over which one of them gets to be my baby and who I love more.

So there you have it. A few insights into my baby big girl Bee at three-years-old. Look out world – she is going to set you on fire when she gets a little older!

Tags: birthdays, children, growing up, toddlers