My Girl, My Heart

My daughter, age 3, cracks me up. She's a night owl like me, bless her little heart, and it makes for a rather exasperating bedtime routine when she has to get up for school the next morning.

"Go to bed."
"No way."
"Go to bed now."
"No way."
"You have school in the morning."
"No way, Jose."
"If you don't go to bed, then you can't go to school."
"NO WAY, JOSE!"

I just don't get it. When she was 2, she bugged me for a whole year to go to school and got PISSED when I told her she needed to wait until she was 3. She loves school. She loves the bus. She loves her book bag. She loves her teacher. She loves her friends. She loves drawing and coloring and counting and reciting the alphabet and writing her name. She just WILL NOT GO TO BED. Actually, I do get it but it's a nightmare of a story that no parent and child should have to live through but do, more often than you might think, let alone recite it.

It's 11:30 p.m. and she still refuses to go to bed after 3-1/2 hours of the above conversation. She is busy sharpening pencils for school, even though she won't go. I have an electric sharpener and a box of about 200 pencils for the kids for school, and she thinks she needs to sharpen each and every one of them. Now. Before bed. As though her life depends on each pencil being sharp. Or maybe she's just stalling.

She puts the pencil in the sharpener and grinds away. She pulls it out and sees it's just not pointy enough and puts it back in. More grinding. More checking. More grinding. When she's done, the brand-new, unsharpened pencil might be 3 inches long.

"Another," she says.
"No way," I say.
"Another."
"No way, Jose."
"ANOTHER!"
"NO WAY, JOSE!"

My God, I've turned into a 3-year-old. But you get the picture. She drew 14 E's on the bedroom wall with a crayon. She took the blue marker and "painted" her fingernails since I didn't get to painting her nails with polish in a timely manner. To top it off, she demanded that I let her help me do my Copaxone injection (she likes to push the button on the autoject device) then laughed when I said "ouch." She's not a beast, though, because it started bleeding and she started crying, grabbing for tissues and screaming "Momma owie bleeeeeeeeeeeeeding!" I think (I hope) she's not really laughing about the fact that it hurt but at the face I made when I said it.