Interesting

First off, just a friendly reminder that if you want a chance at winning Daniel Tammet's book Born on a Blue Day you have until midnight tonight (Sunday the 18th) to submit your name for my blog. I've really enjoyed reading everyone's suggestions. You are all so creative!

Now, moving onto the real reason for this post. I find it interesting that most times that I find Hannah role playing of her own volition it is a reenactment of a situation that is difficult (or at the very least unpleasant) for her. For example, she puts her stuffed animals and Little People in time out and gives them reminders, she fixes food at her kitchen and then pretends to eat it or feeds it to me, she does her entire bedtime routine to put her babies and stuffed animals (and tonight me!) to bed or down for a nap, she even takes her own temperature or takes her baby doll's temperature. All of these activities are ranked extremely low on her favorites list, but yet when she's playing on her own she chooses to think about them and recreate them. I wonder why?

Another thing I find interesting is Hannah's fixation with my hair. She's always liked playing with it and stroking it and pulling it, but her fascination with it has really ramped it up a notch recently. Right after Christmas I decided to get my hair cut. Because I was planning on making quite a drastic change (I cut off 14 inches) I prepped Hannah for it extensively. I showed her about how short it would be and we pulled my hair up to see what I might look like afterwards. I expected her to either be totally freaked out when I came home or intrigued for awhile. Thankfully she didn't freak out, but her fascination with my hair has lasted for much longer than I ever could have expected. It's been over 3 weeks now and she still comes up to me, grabs both sides of my hair and says, "I love your hair Mommy." Until I got my hair cut she'd never said anything about the way my hair looked before. She's also still asking/stating "You got your hair cut?" and "Your hair is short?" pretty much every day. I wonder exactly what's going on in her little 2 1/2 year old mind that makes this change so captivating for her.

This past week has been a bit rocky because we've been stuck inside A LOT and I don't just mean inside like we haven't played outside. I mean inside like we didn't leave the house for 3 days straight even to go to the mailbox and get the mail because it was below zero the entire time with windchills that were even colder at around -30 degrees Fahrenheit! There's only so much of each other Hannah and I can take without other human contact and we were totally at each other's throats before the weekend rolled around. Thankfully Kyle didn't have to work this weekend and it finally warmed up to a balmy 8 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday so we got a bit of a reprieve. Today was much better. We went to church and out to lunch with friends. Hannah even took a good nap. Here's hoping that tomorrow will be just as good. We're going to the library (we haven't been in almost 2 weeks which is unusual for us) so that should be a nice diversion.

PS. Just in case you were wondering about the choice of photos for this post, all of these pictures with the exception of the first one were taken by Hannah herself. When our camera started frizzing out on us this past fall we gave it to Hannah to play with once we got our new one. It still works, although it frequently takes blurry or split image photos. She's a photo taking machine just like her mama and takes dozens of pictures every single day! What a chip off of the old block. I'm so proud!