I sometimes feel like I give a false impression of Alex because I’m so used to this type of child after a decade of Elizabeth that I don’t bother to talk about it. So I share the funny bits and the sweet bits and the remarkable bits and just keep living the difficult and the extreme bits because it’s old news at this point.

Alex is certainly just as fierce and opinionated and strong willed as Elizabeth is. I can’t decide if she is more so or if she just has more territory to compete for. (At Alex’s current age, Elizabeth was still an only child.)

For example, every night I put the kids to bed in age order. The youngest goes first because she needs more sleep than the other two. Tonight she decided she wanted me to come back in her room and hold her in the rocking chair. So she screamed for me the entire time I was putting Ryan and Elizabeth to bed. By the time I came back in, she was so far gone that she started throwing up. So yes, this child is so spirited that she (reasonably often) screams herself to vomit. And it doesn’t even usually register enough for me to bother saying anything about it.

As a side note, Alex (age three and a half) is old enough to throw up into a bucket. But she’s not old enough to know that once she’s done throwing up, she shouldn’t angrily shove the bucket away from her so that it tips over and spills all over her crib anyway. Sigh.

Alex was up a few times last night and then got up for good a little before six this morning (which Elizabeth helpfully pointed out to me later “felt like it was before five!”) She kept drinking water in a panicked way and then all of a sudden she was throwing up all over the kitchen floor.

This is a thing my kids do. We generally do not get stomach viruses. We’ve only had one that I can remember. (Ryan and I got it last year and even then, we each only threw up twice or so.) But when my kids get sick with a virus, they throw up once at the beginning of the illness, within a few hours of starting the fever, and then they run a normal fever/cough/flu/justavirus with no more throwing up.

So random fevers make my kids throw up, but only once, and besides that, they have excellent stomachs. And the kitchen floor is a wonderful place to throw up, if you are three and going to do it. It is way better than your car seat while going 75 miles per hour down the highway halfway through a three hour drive. Not that Alex did that the last time she got a fever or anything.

The kids’ taekwondo school does a monthly student of the month. Today, we were there for class (probably 90% of the school is the after school program and the remaining kids come in with a parent like my kids do) and afterwards they had the student of the month presentation.

Immediately afterwards, as we were leaving, Elizabeth marched up to the owner of the school and said “So. Do you HAVE to be an after schooler to win student of the month?”

And this man, who has two children of his own and has been running an after school program for more than a decade, looked her in the eye and said “No. Do you think I should award it to your brother next month?”

One of Alex’s favorite activities is to go to Petsmart and look at the kittens they have for adoption. (All my children would very much like to have a kitten but unfortunately for them, they have parents who are allergic to cats.)

We stop by Petsmart occasionally and we always must see all the animals but we spend the most time by the cats. Alex’s favorite is when they are baby kittens because she waves a cat toy in front of them and they all have endless energy to play with her.

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