Tara at 3.5 Years Old

Tara is 3.5 yo now and has developed into a very verbal kid. I think the only time that she is silent is when she is asleep. The rest of the time, she is talking and talking and talking. She has a very rich fantasy life, doing lots of pretend play. Not only with toys, she also likes to command her siblings around, who are not always thrilled by that, to say the least :-) We have told her that everybody is the boss of her/his own body and that they don't have to do what she tells them to. Of course, now at night, when we ask her to go to sleep, she will tell us 'I am the boss of my own body and I don't want to go to sleep!' :-)

She moved out of our family bed when she was 2.5yo. She was very adamant on having her own bed, and even more adamant that if she woke up at night, mama needed to be there with her in her bed! No way was she going to come over to our bed! So I had a period of playing musical beds at night, since at that point in time Jane still slept in our family bed and they both needed nursing at night. Luckily we are past that phase now, she totally sleeps through the night now, although she still insists on me getting her out of bed in the morning, instead of coming down herself. 'Mama, mama, MAMA!!! I am AWAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'. She still nurses, but mostly only in the morning when she gets up and at night before she goes asleep.

She potty trained when she was just over 3yo, at the same time when Jane did. That was fun, going from three in diapers to one in diapers, almost overnight! She actually started sometimes peeing in the toilet when she was 18mo, but was not interested in training then. I am glad I didn't try to get her potty trained at that age, I think that would have been frustrating for both of us. Now the process was painless. I think running around naked a lot helped her to see what was happening. There was quite a long period of time, when she would go pee in the toilet when she was naked, but not if she was wearing either a diaper or underwear.

You might wonder about the short hair. Well, last September, we had the Hair Cutting Incident... Tara had loved to cut her own finger and toe nails for quite a while and was doing a great job with it too. She even always put them back in their proper place when she was finished! So I didn't really think twice when she got the scissors out and started cutting them while watching a video when I needed to put Kate down for a nap. Coming back, the first thing I noticed was hair on the floor. 'Oh no, not again!' (We had had quite some hair cutting episodes of the boys that summer) And looking up, I saw Tara, with almost all hair gone from one side of her head.... Happily announcing 'I cut my hair, mama!' ...

Oh well, it did grow longer again. I did have to take out the clippers and give her a real short hair cut though. She actually still looks a little like a little boy. That day, Sander was rather shocked when he came home.

By now she doesn't cut her own nails any more, but bites them instead. That wouldn't be very unusual about her finger nails, but the weird thing is, that she also bites her toe nails! She will be sitting watching television, absentmindedly biting her toe nails at the same time!

She loves playing outside, on her tricycle, in her little Tykes car or just running around or climbing in trees in our back yard. Last summer, she was the one who was the most interested in the whole gardening process, helping me a lot with planting and watering flowers and vegetables. During the winter, we could often find her outside eating snow! (see pic on the left). She likes slides too, and loves going to the playground where she can run around and climb. Another current favorite climbing place is our washer. We often find Tara and Jane together on the washer. Tara will be saying things like 'Come on, Jane! We are having a tea party!'. And of course turning on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off the light above the washer is a lot of fun too!

She is kind in the middle of playing with her siblings. Sometimes she joins her older brothers in their play, at other times she is playing a lot with Jane or Kate. Actually she and Timmy seem to have developed one of those relationships, where they are either very nicely playing together, or fighting very bitterly. There does not seem to be a gray area in between there at the moment.

One more thing we can say about her, is that she is LOUD! Somehow she thinks you are more right if you scream louder! Drives me crazy, if I have finally got the baby down for a nap, then do something downstairs. She will walk very quietly upstairs, open the door of our bedroom and loudly announce 'THE BABY IS AWAKE!!!'. Yes, now she is! Of course baby will be grumpy the rest of the day, by not having had enough sleep. If Kate is asleep, I also have to make sure that she doesn't come to close to the stairs, playing, because the loudness of her play might wake her up too.

She was the one of our kids, who seemed to have been most in awe of attending Kate's birth. She still talks about it and is convinced she has two babies in her own belly, but they are not going to come out yet. She likes watching the video of Kate's birth and Jane's birth too. I still remember when we were preparing for Kate's birth and showed her the Jane birth video for the first time. She was watching it intently and her comment was a very amazed 'The baby is naked!!!' when Jane came out. I think she had somehow imagined that a baby would be born with clothes already on!

She likes to watch Disney videos, and loves being read to. She has started 'reading' her own books, by reciting the words from memory. She loves to play with Duplo or blocks. And she is very fascinated by real lego too, has had some of it and loves it! Sander is very happy about that, since he is a severe lego addict :-) She does a lot of playing on the computer, all kinds of different games. She likes to play with dolls, taking them for walks all around the house and making up stories about them. I love watching her when she is in one of her fantasy plays, it is so much fun to hear what kind of scenarios she is coming up with!