Three

She is so big. She jumps at me with abandon and an overabundance of trust. She leaps first, looks second. Or never. She is a menace on her scooter. Her physical fearlessness terrifies me and inspires me equally.

She is little. After dribbling a basketball for the first time, she runs to me in triumph, makes sure I know, I saw.  She needs me to hold her - and her accomplishment - for a minute before rushing off to do it again.

She can climb the pulls on her dresser like a ladder and sing her ABCs (with "Elmo" in there instead of "l, m, n, o") and count to twenty (only missing a few numbers!) and hang with the older kids (and try to boss them around) and brush her own teeth (poorly but don't you DARE take that brush) and she's totally definitely THREE.

And wearing the dress I made her for her birthday!

Did you read this post over at Dooce? I laughed out loud and clutched my laptop to my chest in relief. Three is our dreaded year, too. Z completely and totally fell apart when she was three. She was defiant, unreasonable, cranky, whiny, and stubborn and no, I really haven't run out of adjectives but I'll stop there anyway. She was also moving across the country and greeting her new sister all while her mom was slowly but surely falling apart at the usual seams and some she didn't even know existed.

When Z went through three, I didn't know what three was like so I assumed that we had broken our child. We broke her with the move AND the baby sister and she would never be the same.

So it is almost a relief that E is challenging now. There are no baby sisters, no major multiple upheavals in our home and still she is defiant and unreasonable. Whiny and stubborn. Dropping her nap and resisting bedtime. Right on time.

Three. Oh three. It is a very good thing they're still so darn cute.