I thought I would share a couple of funny stories about Madelyn lately. Two nights ago she got this idea that she would take toilet paper and string it across the room and she announced that we were going to have a race and that her string of toilet paper was the finish line. It was pretty funny and creative I thought...until I found tape all over every chair and piece of furniture in our house because she kept making finish lines. then lately she has had this funny thing about liking animals and since derek dislikes live animals (dogs and cats and house pets) she decided to adopt some stuffed animals and has called them her pets. She has a container of barbie dolphins (who actually live with two mermaids who are responsible for feeding them) then she has a cat, and a dog, (all stuffed of course) and then she has about 4 fish in a container (who are actually all founder from the little mermaid collections that we have accumulated). Today I went to the dollar store and got her a dolphin and a killer whale (which she calls an orca from a computer zoo game that she plays...they call them orcas--did you even know what an orca was at 4 years old?) and then two puppies that move and wag their tales who are now the babies of her stuffed dog. moving from the upstairs to the downstairs or vice-versa is very difficult because we have a lot of cages and animals to move. The funniest thing about them all is that she INSISTS that they are real. I first tried to tell her that they were not and she became very upset and told me that they WERE REAL! So, I just said, okay.
A couple weeks ago I came home from a trip and Madelyn approached me on the subject of the river Nile and how she wants me to buy it so that we can put it in our backyard and she can have 'clean' animals like dolphins and sea turtles and we could have clean drinking water and go swimming.
And then the funniest thing today...no idea how she came up with this one, but today she asked me when I was still in bed, she came into my room and said, "mom, can we dig an underground tunnel in our back yard and have a secret passage way to our house?" i was like, um, i don't know madelyn, i think it would be hard to dig deep enough and i don't think dad would want us to dig up his grass. she said back to me, "but mom, we're not going to dig up all his grass, just a little tiny part." i said, i don't think we can dig a deep enough hole, why don't we make secret passage ways with some boxes and we can make tunnels with them. She was very insistant that that WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA and that we had to dig real tunnels. I'm going to have to monitor her television watching because I really have no idea where she is getting these ideas.
Then last week she was playing her zoo game before it was time to go to preschool. I kept telling her to come down stairs to go and she wouldn't come down. I finally called up to her that she couldn't play her zoo game for the rest of the day. She was very sad and came down crying and said, 'I don't feel special when you tell me things like that. When you say that to me, I don't feel like I am special.' She also came up from watching a movie with Vivian this evening and said Vivian had hurt her and that it made her feel like she wasn't special. It is very, very funny to hear coming from a four year old.
