After having me in a cold sweat wondering where on earth I was going to come up with a Marie Aristocats costume now that the DIsney store has closed, Eliza decided to make things easy on me by deciding that what she really wanted for Halloween was to be Tigger again. Phew!

(Sidenote: She also got her hair cut at the fancypants place I went to on Tuesday and the woman is a magician. Look at this:

The back wedge of this inverted bob is a masterpiece. I like the spikey-short haircut the stylist gave me a lot, but I ADORE what she did with Eliza’s hair. We will definitely be going back — especially since their hairwashing chairs have massagers built in. (I am not posting a pic of my hair because I am still learning how to style it and I have a chunk that is all “Vive La Resistance!” today.))

Eliza is a Method actor, because while she is wearing her Tigger costume, she moves almost exclusively via bouncing, which is terribly cute but definitely burns a lot of candy.

I missed the parade at her school today, but this snippet of video of Miss Tigger marching with her class taken by Jim should give you a sense of how things went:

The pictures Jim took of her little friends are INSANELY cute. It kills me that the super-tomboyish little girl in her class dressed as a bride. KILLS me. And even though I swear the little dude in red is a ninja, Eliza swore up and down that he was an astronaut, which seems to be her answer r.e. what all of the boys wore, except one or two pirates. I’m pretty sure she is at least partially making it up because she had no idea what they actually were.

A week or so ago when she learned that there would be a Halloween party at school, Eliza decided that we should make cupcakes for all her friends. We checked with the teacher, who was cool with it, and so we made some chocolate cupcakes with lavender-gray frosting, and then I got some Halloween sprinkles and candy corn to decorate them with. She spend well over an hour yesterday painstakingly decorating each cupcake. “Dis one is for A! And dis one is for C! And DIS one is for Mrs. Z! And I will make one for K. He is sad, and it will cheer him up!” (Apparently one of the special needs kids in her class is a fairly emotionally tender little boy and there is frequent crying, so that is how I tell the two boys who have the same name apart now when she talks about them. “Is this K who cries or the other one?” I ask. She seems unusually solicitous of the one who cries a lot, which is so FREAKING CUTE I can’t stand it.)

Anyway, the cupcakes were awesome. She loves this cake book that Meredith sent us a while back. We made the monster cake for Jim’s birthday on Thursday, and she is really into the alarm clock cake too, so she decided to make cupcakes that were shaped like an alarm clock. This mostly consisted of smooshing two candy corn pumpkins in top in an approximation of the bells you used to see on old-fashioned alarm clocks — except that it looked more like all the cupcakes had breasts, which made yours truly snicker like Beavis and Butthead:

We had a lovely time trick-or-treating, although she is still working out exactly when to say trick or treat (preferably AFTER the people actually open the door) and when to say thank you (it does not really work so much as a greeting, although I suspect it did enhance her stash because the neighbors were rendered insensible by the adorableness). 

I was most amused, though, by her enthusiasm for handing out candy to the other trick or treaters. AT every knock, she bolted for the door, and then she was super-excited about how everyone was dressed. This was sweet for the first half of the evening, when it was all other little kids like her. “Hey! You are a Tigger TOO!”

But it was AWESOME when the Grumpy Teenager Hour started. I HATE Grumpy Teenager Hour, because they are uncouth slobs who can’t even be bothered to engage in the oh-so-onerous social convention of actually saying “Trick or treat.” By the end of the night, I am usually matching them for surliness. Eliza, though, was completely oblivious to the hooligans’ attempts to be intimidating. “Ooh! A ghost!” she shouted at one kid dressed like the murderer in Scream. “Hey! That is a COOL PIRATE costume!” she complimented a dismembered horror-movie ghoul. Amazingly, this charmed the pants off the teenagers. One took off his mask to show her how his glowy eyes worked. Another reciprocated her compliment: “Hey, you’re Tigger! Cool!” and he and his friends exchanged hi-fives with her. 

It was the best.

Happy Halloween.

This is one of those posts where the original purpose of my blog, i.e. documenting for/discussing with Eliza’s relatives how she is the most brilliant, fantastic-est child EVER, collides with the fact that people outside my family — who are not required to drink the same Koolaid — read this now. Which is to say, I am fully aware that I am being a braggart right now, and you are welcome to avert your eyes until we return to the regularly scheduled programming.

Eliza’s known the alphabet since she was about 15 months old. It’s also been a while since she figured out that it wasn’t just a party trick to know her letters, but that they make sounds which you combine to make words.

I had predicted that by the end of preschool, she’d be starting to read, and it looks like she’s on her way: in the past few days, she deciphered “mom” “dad” “mat” and, if I remember right, “man” when I wrote them out for her. Obviously, this way lies Nobel Prize-dom.

She has also been starting to write. Her teacher has been working with her to help her learn the proper pencil grip, and I think it has stuck. Once she started doing that, it was a small step to start to learn to write letters, and she has really gotten into the little optional “homework” sheets the teacher gives out. It’s totally up to the kids whether they do them, but Eliza doesn’t see them as work and always tackles them enthusiastically.

Tonight, totally unprompted, she told me she was going to write “foot,” and then she proceeded to write an “f” and a “t” next to each other. I told her that foot had some o’s in it, so she added two amoeba-like circles at the end. (She is sort of “eh” about writing the letters that belong in a word in the proper order.)

After that, since she seemed to be having fun showing off, I asked her if she knew how to write her name, and she said she did. Eliza wrote her name! True, some of the letters are a bit wonky (please see notes for translation of 3-year-old script) but it is demonstrably her name, and I could just DIE from the sheer stupendousness of her awesomeness.

Eliza has peed her pants a bunch of times in the past week. This is because she does not like to interrupt her plans for world domination for such a foolish thing as sitting on the potty.

“Eliza, do you need to use the potty?”

“NO! I already did that today!” she howls, and then proceeds to crumple to the floor in anguish over her captivity in this house of potty-obsessed overlords.

Eventually, we either pick her up and plop her on the potty or she pees her pants and then things really go south because while I have complete understanding for the occasional accident, peeing your pants because you are Fighting The Power is, uh, unnecessary.

I may have cracked it though, and this is another one of those conversations you never picture yourself having when you are all blissed out because “Yippee! I’m havin’ a baybee!”:

AM: “I use the potty at least five times a day! I make LOTS of poops and peepees EVERY DAY in the potty!”

Eliza: “I will use the potty TWELVE times a day! For peepees and POOPS!”

AM: “Well then, you’d better get up there and get to work”

Eliza: scurries upstairs

Possibly related: The word “POOPER” is the single most hilarious word in the entire history of language, ever, followed closely by “Stinkerbell.”

Between the non-verbal and Latino kids in her class, Eliza is being exposed to not one but 2 languages in pre-school: her teachers often explain things to kids either in Spanish or using sign language. It is starting to sink in that there are different modes of communication; she gets that you can say different words to mean the same thing, and also that you can use your hands to communicate.

The problem is that this kid is an inveterate bullshit artist. This is my fault; if you ask me a question, I will give you an answer, based on my best guess. The difference is, if I don’t really have a clue, I will tell you that this is what I think the answer might be, whereas Eliza will just sort of dead-pan you as she spouts off. You will have no idea, unless you have expertise in the subject at hand, that she is completely uninformed on the subject. 

The intersection between this trait and her grasp of language is worth the price of admission. Before, if you asked her to say thus-and-such in Spanish, she just mumbled some total jibberish. Lately, however, she has transitioned to pronouncing English words in new and innovative ways to pass them off as Spanish. The other day she told me she was having loonch, and that she wanted to eat some pitahtoes. Also, she was looking at the noombers on the clock. And then she started throwing what can only be described as gang signs, intricately twisted hand positions that she insisted were numbers 1 through 12. 

Now, I know that some of the real stuff is making its way into her brainpan because she has been chirping “adios” at people, and she signed an “a” at me this afternoon. In the meantime, though, she is cracking my butt up.

***

Usually, this is about the time when I announce my participation in NaBloPoMo for the month of November, but I have realized that it is not to be this year. We will be at Jim’s dad and stepmom over Turkey Day, and I will not have access to any computer where I would feel comfortable blogging.

I had contemplated doing NaNoWriMo because I had a corker of a gothic horror novel plot come to me in a dream about a month ago, but that is roughly, oh, even more impossible. Also, I may have creeped myself out. Hello, Imagination: STOP that! Maybe it’ll be a New Year’s resolution.

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For the record: The Small Person, who was an ornery mess much of last week and a good portion of this weekend, pulled out a win and was NOT on my list of Items to Freecycle for today.

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I have made a hair appointment at a salon where all the stylists look slightly scary, in a “covered in tats and have crazy haircolors” sort of way. My strategy is that maybe they will not make me look like one of those fiberoptic thingers from the 1970s where all the hairs are the same length the way the mall ladies have been doing lately (thus necessitating the frightening experiments with home haircuts), but more like this or this or this or this, only with a shinier forehead and without the model-crazy-eyes. Will update as I can and promise laughs, even if (especially if) my strategy is a hideous failure.