The former baby

Julia has had a lot of ups and downs over our few months with Allie.  She definitely is missing her "baby" role at times.  Even today she was looking at her baby pictures and talking baby talk to me and Matt.  When grandparents are around, she especially seems aware of being booted out of her role.   She is about the only one that gets irritated with Allie and Allie can do things like scratch her sometimes.  She can get frustrated when Allie keeps her up or takes up her room during naps.  But mostly she has been great with her and seems made to be a little mama.  She will reassure Allie when she cries in their room, sing to her, speak to her as if she's the responsible adult in charge, take her on walks, etc.  She is at her best with Allie when no one else is around...i.e. when there's no competition for attention.  :)

Julia is still our sweet and spicy one.  She plans parties like crazy, wrapping gifts for everyone, decorating, putting on music to celebrate.  Recently she had given all her candy away and couldn't find anything for my present so she gave me a couple of her dollars.  She got called out at school for bringing in things for her friends, and told she had to bring stuff for everyone.  I think that was her teacher's way of deterring her from bring stuff at all.  But that would not stop Julia!  On multiple occasions she has brought in little gifts/ cards for every kid in class.

This morning before I was even awake she had started to make me an early Mother's Day present-- a pear made into a person flying a helicopter...based on a picture from a book.  

This afternoon held a long, mostly one way conversation, covering how she will save the world from poverty by getting everyone who has money here to send money to China and then once China doesn’t have poor people, they will send to the next poor country like Haiti and then so on.  😊  Started with asking if we could make some dumplings and rice and mail them to poor people in China.  At the end she threw in a barrel of questions about what would have happened if Adam and Eve didn’t “do that”...would there be less poor people? Would we know that sin is wrong? Was God just using them as an example?  She didn’t really want her questions answered...just to be heard I think.  Oh- and she wants Matt to take her somewhere poor to help people instead of going to Chicago one day.  And Nanny and Pa to take her on her 10 year trip somewhere poor.  And she wants to go to Haiti with Miss Alicia when she’s in middle school.  She definitely has a passion for helping people and I'm excited to see where it takes her.

On the spicy side, she brings so much drama to our lives.  There's her crazy dancing and singing/lip synching of course, but then also drama over everyday things.  

She and I are going to run a mile race in a few weeks and did our first training run this week.  She began by saying she wanted to run around the house till it's been an hour.   I said since Allie is asleep and Gray in charge, we’ll do 10 minutes...that’s about how long it will take us to run a mile anyway.  
J: But that’s so short!
me: The boys can run in about 7 minutes.  
J: Can I do 7?  Please can I do 7?
me: Well it’s about how fast you can run.  We only have two weeks to practice so we’ll just do our best to run the whole time.....  

Then we started out and she was cute as she could be for the first 2 minutes.  Then she says, “Okay I definitely do not want to do 7.”  Ha!

Then “Mommy, why can’t we just turn on the trail to our house?!?!” 

me: But we’ve only been going 4 minutes...we have to go farther till it’s 10 minutes.  
J:  “But it hurts.  Ow, OW, OWWWW, OWWW” loudly the whole way up the hill to our house.  

We went 8 minutes.  She ended grumpy and mad and “I TOLD you 10 was too long.”  Whew.  She has become the queen of sassy arguments and it’s about to do me in.  Hopefully our next run will be more pleasant and she’ll actually understand what running 10 minutes means!

One thing's for sure.  Life with this one is always going to be interesting!!