Rose-girl

Since Amber turned one year old, I have been meaning to do an "all about Amber" post. Then I thought it would be nice to do a solo post for each of my kids, since it's been a while since I wrote about them individually. As the middle child, Rose isn't first very often, so that's why I'm starting with her--not that she even knows or cares much about her mom's silly blog right now. Oh well, Rose is FIRST today. 

This morning around 10:30am, Amber needed a nap, so I put her down and decided to devote some quality time to Rose. We split a Costco muffin and then bundled up and jumped the sugar rush out of our systems on the trampoline in the cold. We giggled and danced and wiggled and bounced all over the place. We played zombie tag (one person walks like a zombie with eyes closed, trying to attack/tag the other person). We played don't let the mom pee her pants--that one got Rose really laughing. We did clumsy bad ballet moves. It was so refreshing to spend time with Rose where we were just goofing off instead of one of us trying to boss the other around like usual, ha ha. 

Rose is such a little fireball--she KNOWS what she wants to say, wear, eat, do, love, etc, and she GOES for all of it with a passion. This creates quite a variety of...scenes. Here's a sample of Rose, copied from my journal lately:

November 13th: this morning, walking home from dropping Jay off at school, she suddenly grabbed my arm, tipped her head back dramatically, looked up at me, and said "Mommy? I love you. You're the best Mommy I've ever had in my whole life." Then, her voice went up an octave and she leaned over Amber who was in the stroller and said: "you're the best little Hangaber [hamburger] I ever had." Rose has such intense emotions!! She feels every emotion with her whole self. 

November 18th: This morning Rose wouldn't put on long sleeves or shoes because she didn't want to cover up her painted fingernails and toenails. Steph painted them yesterday, and Rose feels beautiful. I had to work hard to figure out how to get her to choose to put on something warm. [there was no WAY she was going to bend her will to mine in a matter of beauty!] I let her pick one: coat OR shoes. She picked a coat [and then walked barefoot across the driveway to the car in the 30 degree air without a single complaint].

Rose came running upstairs this afternoon saying, "Mommy! I paused the movie because I want to tell you something that's spectacular! Amber just walked from the TV to me because I was sitting on the footstool! Isn't that amazing? And I wanted to get Bunny." [Rose listens a LOT and picks up some of the best words. The word SPECTACULAR rolls deliciously off of her four year old tongue]

November 19th: It is stressful carting two kids around on errands, especially when one of them is such a headstrong little creature! ROSE! I never can trust that she'll choose to listen to me, so the uncertainty along with the concern for her safety and consideration of others totally wears me thin. And today we had to walk allllll the way back into the back corner of Costco [carrying Amber] to go to the bathroom after I had already lugged our cart all the way out to our car. WHEW, that has to be at least a quarter of a mile. 

There was a collision in the kitchen the other night. These girls have one volume when they're in pain: LOUD. 

One of the top ten joys of motherhood is watching my kids play in the park. Does it get much better than flowing hair, sunshine, and carefree smiles? 

Even though it's blurry, I really love this picture.

Leaf rubbings never get old!

 

Rose really likes drawing pictures together, especially when we both draw on the same page. Today I drew a picture of our family on the trampoline, and Rose helped color it. 

Rose built an Amber-proof castle for Elsa and Anna on top of the ping pong table.

One afternoon last week Rose got allllll dressed up and invited me to the basement to watch her act out a "movie"which was part cooking show, part Frozen, part art show, and part creative story. She performed for a solid 20 minutes. She was in rare form.

A little clip of the movie's climax.

And for the grand finale of this post, here's a video of Rose saying the first three articles of faith, but it says that the video exceeds the megabyte limit, so I'm resorting to youtube... We've been working on memorizing them together for family home evenings. Since this video was taken, we have learned the fourth article of faith too. It's always so fun and impressive to hear young kids recite. I'm a huge fan of memorizing.

Rose is a star!