Face paint and other preschool adventures

On Sunday, Alexis announced to her teacher that she loved butterflies. Butterflies had absolutely nothing to do with what they were talking about or doing. It was just something for her to say. So on Wednesday when a person came to face paint and one of the choices was a butterfly, that would be the logical choice for a little girl that announces that she likes butterflies? What would make a girl that loves butterflies not choose a butterfly?

She wanted to be called "Tiger Spiderman Alexis" the whole evening until we washed it off in the shower.

Our little informant:

Alexis was quite tired from pushing her bedtime and also because she had taken some medicine that made her drowsy so the next morning we decided to let her sleep as long as she wanted and wake up on her terms rather than my schedule and daddy would take her to pre-school. It's days like this when she is well rested but not hyper that we get some of the best conversations, especially in the car. She doesn't intend for them to be funny, but we all know that the words that come out of a preschoolers mouth are not well-filtered. The conversation recounted from daddy went something like this:

D: Are you ready for school today?

A: Yeah. I play at school.

D: What do you do?

A: I play with lots of toys and friends and give friends bandaids and ice when they get owies. and I make Grant feel better when Courtney bites him.

D: Do you play with (and names several friends)?

A: Yes (to each one)

D: Do you play with Courtney?

A: No

D: well to be a nice girl, you should play with all your friends. Do other kids play with C?

A: I don't know why. She bites.

First Place

Alexis likes to be first...no matter what. She's sometimes confused by the idea of competition and the fact that she likes to be first is both good and bad.

When playing a game, like Candyland she clearly wants to win and if someone else gets ahead of her, she says "but I want to win too." We can usually avoid her getting upset about not being the actual winner by just being excited about the game being won and over and it helps if we are playing a second (third or fourth) time.

When playing Slug bug, she ALWAYS says "I saw it first" even if we had to point the VW bug out to her. When we try to explain that she did not see it first if we have to show her where it is or if she never saw it (which we test by asking her the color). She still thinks that she sees it first. We have started playing this game so much in the car that if she falls asleep in the car and we wake her up while we are still driving, the first words out of her mouth are often "where's the slug bug?"

When Alexis refuses to eat something at a meal and we know that it's not because she isn't hungry but rather just being stubborn then we'll tell her that we can chew our bite of broccoli (or chicken or even cake) faster than she can. We have known that we could never tell her that we would eat a whole portion faster because she will cram as much in her mouth as possible which is also why we won't ever challenge the size of bite, but if we need her to get one bite in her mouth just to get her to try something this is often the method.

If it's the bedtime routine that she won't start, then we try to beat the sun to sleep.

Unfortunately, I think Alexis is starting to catch on to our routine of using races to get her to do things whether it's to go upstairs, downstairs, to the table, put her clothes on etc because this week she started responding with "no mommy, it's not racing time" when she did not want to do something, so I think it's on to the next idea.