Dagny is Everything and Then Some

Dagny's Top Ten:

1. Pink (and sometimes purple) - We did everything we could to avoid it, but Dagny LOVES pink and sparkly things.  We've come to embrace it, for the most part, but we just love the fact that she came to love it all on her own.

2. Hair accessories - she's got ponies, clips, and now more headbands than I can count.  She loves to wear all sorts of combinations of these and it's awesome.  She usually wears her headband across her forehead, 80s style, and it is truly hysterical.  

3. Junk piles - Dagny likes stuff.  Assorted stuff.  Bits of stuff.  Stuff for her stuff.  Whenever she can't find something (like a penny she had two weeks ago or a post-it note that has one sticker on it), we ask her "Have you looked in your junk?" and she dutifully goes into her two buckets in the playroom to dig for the treasure she is in need of.

4. Swings - Dagny loves swinging and will probably be able to get herself started and pump her way into the trees well before she turns four, just needs longer legs!  We can spend over an hour at a playground, much of that on the swings, and we'll pull into the driveway and she'll ask if we can go swing on our backyard structure.

5. Books - Just like her brother, she could be read to all day and often asks to be.  She is also learning to flip through books on her own and you can sometimes catch her telling herself the story.  She loves our weekly trips to the library where she will ask me to find her specific books (Meow and the Little Chairs) or books in a certain genre (Can you find me some camping books, Mommy?).  She's also become quite good at just scanning the shelves and finding good ones all on her own.  

6. Loveys - Dagny, of course, loves her flat loveys Hops (aka Hopsy) and Rocky, but she also loves countless other stuffed animals.  They are constantly rotating between being "crib loveys" to "downstairs loveys" to "car loveys" and back again.  Most of them have banal names like "pink bunny" and "unicorn" but finally she chose to name her little german shepard dog, Gloria, after a current favorite book: Officer Buckle and Gloria.  She sleeps with at least ten of them in her crib so once she goes into a bed, we may have to find creative ways to keep all of them from falling off the edge!

7. Talking - Big surprise, huh? She could go on for days and when Finley's not in the car with us to interrupt her, she just goes and goes.  She asks hysterical questions "What if everyone had five heads?" and most stories start with "yesterday, one time, I..."  She likes to employ very grown up words like when we saw one of her classmates at our local farmers' market, "That was unexpected, Mommy."   She can go line for line with Finley when chatting about rescue vehicles, coast guard rescues, and pirate ships and she owes him a debt of gratitude for the ridiculous vocabulary she has learned.  At bedtime, we'll give her the choice of reading one more book or just talking and 9 times out of 10, she'll pick talking, click her tongue, and say "so..." and she's off to the races.

8. Stickers - She is an amazing sticker peeler and would be pleased as punch to be sitting at a table with a pile of stickers, construction paper, and a mechanical pencil.  She also likes to create sticker art for her friends and family and will instruct me to mail them to the people of her choosing (watch out NY crew, Dagny mail is en route!).

9. Finley - She loves her big brother and often wants to be so close to him, he has to yell out for space.  When we drive around without him, which is rare, she likes to put a stuffed animal in his carseat and buckle it up. She calls this the "pretend Finley."  She has the same capacity for great imaginative play that he does and in the past two months, they have really become terrific playmates. They have their squabbles, of course, but we love seeing them make each other laugh and we know that so much of who they are comes from each other's influence.

10. Too many other things to fit in here so I'll just list other objects of her affection: swimming with her bubble floaty, songs/music, stuffing things into one of her three backpacks and then wearing it around for the rest of the day, playing Uno Moo and The Fishing Game, asking "What are we going to do now?" even at bedtime when we put her in her crib, drinking Stoneyfield Smoothies in one gulp, wearing sunglasses, bubbles, school, and the list goes on.  

She is truly an individual and we can't wait to see what she comes up with next! Here is a random assortment of photos from the past few months that capture her spirit and fashion sense.