Maia Battle Report: Year 3 Month 4

Maia at age 3 is showing small signs of brilliance, like asking what's going on on the other side of the world when the sun goes down, or making a connection between something brand new and something we learned and forgot months ago. She is into a rhyming phase where she likes to string rhyming sounds together like "hocky, blocky, docky". She has definitely entered the WHY?? stage of life which is more irritating than I thought it would be. All it's doing is training me to hold back the reason for something I say so I'll have a follow-up ready for the inevitable WHY??

We're working on her joke abilities, and she has over a 50% chance to guess the punchline of jokes following a known pattern, like animal sounds: "What do cows call the carousel?" or "What do bunnies say to celebrate a birthday?", or "Where do horses live?"

Among other fragments of her life:

• She thinks "toots" are funny and games often center around a bunny pooping in the toilet.
• She invented her own version of the alphabet song that ends, "W, X, Y and Z. That's my alphabet and those are the letters we have!"
• Pink is her favourite color.
• She's really good at navigating mazes without crossing walls, as long as you show here where START and FINISH are.
• The second season of Superwings got really weird, so we switched shows, and she now likes some show about animals that deliver baby animals to parent animals. We started Emperor's New Groove last week but she seems indifferent to finishing it.

For the past couple weeks, we have sent her back to her Sterling Community Center class, 1 hour twice a week. She is the 3rd of 3 students, with masks on and a classroom subdivided into distinct no-travel zones so the kids don't roll on each other. The social time has been good for her although it has restarted the firehose of oddly-sized crafts of questionable artistic value.

Daylight Savings Time, as usual, wrecked her sleep schedule, so her usual sleeptime is 8:30 - 7:30 each night without a nap. We still do about 90 minutes of quiet time in the afternoon, where she plays by herself in her room and Rebecca takes a nap before going to work (still just twice a week). My work is unchanged, with all hours done at home for the forseeable future.