The Messiest Kid Alive!

I believe that Emily is deserving of this title. She was such an easy baby. And despite "the terrible two's", for the most part she has maintained her sweet lil' disposition. There's just one thing....she's a complete mess! A tiny tornado, even. Mike and I have nicknamed her "pig pen". I've never met such a messy kid! Once, twice, sometimes three times a day I am scrubbing floors, walls, and Emily herself in an effort to clean up after this kid. You may remember "The Hot Sauce Disaster" from back in February. That was just a sign of things to come. She draws on the walls, she draws on herself, she rolls in the mud, dumps full cups of milk over her head, empties the pantry and it's contents onto the floor...and that's just scratching the surface. A couple of weeks ago, she arose at 4:30 in the morning and used a WHOLE TUBE of lipstick on herself, my comforter, and worst of all, the carpet in our bedroom. After some extensive online research, I learned that lipstick, with all of it's pigments and wax is the worst thing to remove from carpet. Lucky me. After scrubbing for 2 hours while she looked on, I noticed that she had disappeared from my side and gotten very quiet. Not good. I looked in her room....no Emily. I called down the stairs...silence. I searched the downstairs, calling her name...nothing. I started to panic. There was no way out of the house. The doors were locked. Where was she?! And then I heard a giggle from under the dining room table...where Emily sat with a whole bag of blueberries that she scored from the freezer while I was distracted with the lipstick mess. She had rubbed the blueberries all over her body, drawing tribal-looking designs around her face and down her nose in addition to rubbing them onto the table legs and carpeting. AHHHHHHH!

This brings us to the pictures I took yesterday. After a late night of 4th of July festivities and a day at the pool, Emily passed out on the playroom floor. This is completely out of character for her. Despite all of my attempts, she gave up her afternoon nap weeks ago. She won't even sleep in the car when we take long roadtrips. She's a ball of energy! She fell asleep as I was making dinner. I wanted her to go to bed on time that night, so I woke her up. She was NOT a happy camper. So I decided to turn her and Ava loose in the backyard while I finished making dinner. Bless her heart, she found a cup that was left out from the cookout. She used it to scoop up mulch and give her self a mulch shower, dumping cupfull after cupfull over her head!

Here she is, so tired...and so dirty!





But look at her sweet baby face! I couldn't love this kid more...even if she is the dirtiest kid on the block.




3 shampoos and rinses and she still had mulch clinging to her precious little skull when I combed her baby-fine sunbleached hair this morning.

Today, after she created yet another big mess in our playroom, a friend stopped by. "Why are you making such big messes, Emily?" my friend inquired. She smiled her giant, bright Emily smile and answered, "I YIKE to be DIRTY. Yes I do!" Great.

Ava: The Big Kid

Now that we know that Em is the "Messiest Kid Alive", it's only fair that I update about Ava too. I snapped this picture of her yesterday while I was brushing the mulch off of Emily to prepare her for the journey across the house and upstairs to the bath.

Recently, a friend who has known Ava from birth passed through town. Ava was excited to show off her newly decorated room. My friend looked around Ava's room, decorated with posters from Mary Poppins on Broadway, Barbie paraphernalia, a bulletin board decorated with pictures of her cousins and friends, and her freshly made bed (Ava's new housekeeping skill) with her iCarly bear in it's place of honor on the pillow, then looked and me and said, "Wow. She's like a 'kid' now. Not a baby...but a kid."

Yeah. I know. And it's a little bittersweet.

Ava is growing up SO fast. I can hardly believe that she'll be starting kindergarten next month! She's having a busy summer. That seems to be how she's the happiest....busy! (She really is a mini-me). She kicked off the summer with her dance recital, then she was off visiting my family in Indiana for a week, playing with cousins, and attending a "Princess" dance camp and vacation bible school. We picked her up so that she could enjoy a few days at the lake with Mike's family and then it was home in time for the Fourth of July with her little girlfriends. This week she's doing "Safety Town", a tradition in Ohio for children entering kindergarten, where they learn about bus safety, fire safety, stranger danger, etc. Next week, she's super-psyched to do VBS with all of her church friends here, and then it's cheer camp with all of her neighborhood girlfriends for 3 days. She adores our neighbor and sometime babysitter, a soon-to-be high school senior who will be one of her counselors at camp. Are you tired yet? After cheer camp, she heads back to Indiana for a week with Grandma Pammy and Papa Nick (Mike's parents) and a week of adventures with cousin Nicholas. Whew! After that, we'll have two weeks to "chill" and then I'll be walking her right through those elementary school doors. *sniff*

Part of me misses "Baby Avy" and part of me can't wait to see what she'll do next. On any given day she's already an artist, a cook (Gee, I wonder where she gets that from?), a scholar (she loves to read...chapter books now!), a philosopher...or is it an anthropologist("So if the dinosaurs were here before the cave men, were the cave men Adam and Eve's kids?"), a minister (she converted the tree in front of our house into a "church" and leads her girlfriends in prayer regularly), a drama queen, a singer, a princess, a tom boy (she can climb trees like a monkey and makes a mean mudpie), a fashionista (she's in the dresses ONLY phase right now), a teacher ("Emily, you write an "E" like this!"), a skilled negotiator and debater, a social butterfly, a budding swimmer, and much more!

Still, at the end of the day she curls up to me in her bed during storytime and begs me to snuggle "just a little bit longer" when I close the book. I know that this won't always be her request. She's a big kid now, after all.