The First Four Were Just a Warm Up

Sharpies.  High heels.  Bicycles.  Chocolate milk.  If it can be thrown, spilled, or wielded as a weapon, Sylvie will find a way.

She changes clothes four times per day.  Each time she does, every single item is pulled out of the dresser; every dress pulled down from the hanger.

Wearing Colette's dress, riding Will's bike

She eats spreadable butter out of the tub.  She comes each night to our bed and sleeps on Phil's head.  Lately her favorite activity is "riding bikes" outside with the neighbors.  This should be a fun activity, except she does not care at all about cars.  In fact she pretty much cries in Sylvie-speak to every car that dares to cross through the tricycle/riding toy thoroughfare:  "BRING IT ON MOTHER-EFFERS!"

She draws on herself, the walls, the table.  The only time I can be sure she is not causing permanent property damage or otherwise wreaking havoc is when I turn on freaking Caillou and give her a bottle.  Then she twirls her hair into dreadlocks so impressive that a Jamaican hair braider would hire her on the spot.  (And if you want to trigger a Pavlovian desire for hard liquor in PVT or me, just go ahead and turn on Caillou.  It might as well be a drinking game.)  

Why don't I keep closer tabs on her, you ask?  Sheesh, I try.  But with four others, plus an infant, and the homework and never ending laundry, sometimes I am distracted.

Her favorite phrase?  "NO I NOT!"

This morning she ate two cookies for breakfast.  I just couldn't fight the good fight so early in the morning.  

PVT coined a term for Sylvie:  she "lives large."  Nothing she does is really malicious (unless she is trying to get back at me, in which case she will try to pick up the baby); she is just intense, bright, and ready to take on the world.  Oh poor world.

God we love her.  I don't want to quash that inimitable spunk.  But please let us survive until she's three.