Elizabeth gets to pick two books at bedtime for me to read to her before she goes to sleep*. This afternoon at her parent-teacher conference, her teacher said that she would like to see Elizabeth get a little extra reading practice in (apparently Elizabeth’s reading scores slipped from Totally Awesome down to Still Awesome But Less So and her teacher wants to nip it in the bud before she slips to Kind of Awesome But You Might Want to Work On That or Sorry We Can’t Call That Awesome Anymore.) So tonight at bedtime, I informed Elizabeth of the new policy- she reads one book to me and then I read one book to her.

First she pouted and stamped her foot (it doesn’t seem that terrible, but she doesn’t approve of change) and tried to negotiate to make me change my mind (I threw her teacher under the bus and said it was her fault- sorry, teacher.) Then she chose Goodnight, Gorilla for the book she was going to read and the Pixar bedtime story book for me to read. If you don’t own both of those books, Goodnight, Gorilla is almost exclusively pictures, containing the words Good Night and very little else and the Pixar bedtime story book is so long that I normally only let her choose one story from it on two book nights.

(She was required to choose again and begrudgingly read Curious George’s Opposites AND Goodnight, Gorilla. I still had to read from Pixar.)

*Spends the next hour and a half getting in and out of bed and trying to get me to come back up to “check on her.”

Since they used to be so much smaller and now they are getting ALL big.

When I picked Elizabeth up from school today, she showed me a tiny angel charm she found. She said “I’m an angel, right?” And I agreed, of course. Then she said “and I can control the wind.”

Today is my baby niece’s first birthday. She lives far away so we FaceTimed her to watch her open her presents. (Board books and wooden rainbow stacker) (I highly recommend the stacker.) Before getting on FaceTime, Elizabeth insisted that she needed to get dressed up, so she headed to her room and I headed off to change Ryan’s diaper. She bounced back in Ryan’s room and said “while you’re at it, Mama, get Ryan dressed in his fanciest outfit too.” So I put him in his tiny three piece suit. Elizabeth chose her new Incredibles shirt and her fluffiest pink skirt, wrapped sashes around her hands like streamers, put on a sparkly headband, and then allowed us to make the call. She also performed a dance and a song for her cousin. (Her cousin, being exactly one, spent her time waving her rainbow stacker around and not properly appreciating the dance and song. Luckily she was accompanied by grown ups who know the proper responses.)

After dinner later, we had to have ice cream in honor of the first birthday.

I couldn’t find a tutorial for a heart braid online so I wrote one myself.

We started with a nice straight part. (During breakfast so that our model would HOLD STILL ALREADY.) Next I separated out a ponytail and put her hair in a rubber band.

Next, I split the ponytail in half, pulled the rubber band a little looser and looped the ponytail through itself. But I did it upside down from how you normally do this. When you have finished, the ponytail sticks straight up.

Then I divided the hair in half and tightened up the ponytail again.

Then I braided both sections of hair and tied them off with rubber bands. I have little tiny black rubber bands that I use when I want to hide them in her hair so I used those.

Next I just put another rubber band around the bottom of both braids to tie them together.

You can stop here but I decided to slip two bobby pins in to help the top of the heart overcome gravity just a little bit.

I think I might start with wet hair and some hair gel next time to make it look a little neater, but I am satisfied and so is Elizabeth! Valentine’s party at school today and when you have to wear a uniform, you need fancy hair.