Lately, Kate is on a very big "I can do everything by myself" kick. I will be exploring this theme in great detail in the newsletter I will write for her soon, but in the meantime, one of her self-initiated projects yielded some funny photos, and I thought I'd post them.

There are a lot of challenging things about Kate's new-found drive to do things herself, but one of the nice things is that she's insisting on helping me unload the dishwasher every morning. This isn't actually very helpful now, since her "helping" me means that I stand by the dishwasher while she lifts each individual plate, bowl, spoon, fork and whatsit out at a painfully slow pace and then hands it to me to be put away. It takes what I would estimate to be approximately one hundred years to get the whole dishwasher unloaded this way. Not to mention that I pretty much have to wash all the spoons again by hand since Kate insists on licking them before she hands them to me. (Not the forks. Only the spoons. I don't know why.) But I figure if I'm patient, she might actually learn to unload the dishwasher herself, and then I can hand the job over to her on a permanent basis and sit around painting my nails in all that free time. Sure, she'll basically be my little slave, but look how happy she is about it now:

After I took the above photo I was just kind of standing there with my camera, waiting for her to give me another individual spoon to put away, and instead, she started digging around in her purse, which of course she has to have on her shoulder in order to unload the dishwasher.

After a while, she came up with a set of keys. No, not her little plastic keys that came with the purse, but the actual keys to my actual car, which I did not know she had. She must have taken them out of my purse and put them into hers when I wasn't looking. And unless I had been watching her, I might now be shopping for a new remote clicker to unlock my car, because this is what she did with my keys.

Yes! Put them in the dishwasher! Where I always put my keys! Surely that would have been the first place I looked next time I was frantically searching for the keys.

Needless to say, I recently became the proud owner of an over-the-door hook upon which to hang my purse, high out of reach behind a closed door. But I would have had the cleanest keys in town if Kate's plan had succeeded.

Dear Kate,

I usually talk in these letters about all the things you are doing in a month, and while I'll certainly be getting to that in a few minutes, I think the overwhelming theme of the last two months of your life hasn't been about what you will do but how you will do it. Namely, you will DO IT YOURSELF. Right this red hot minute. And heaven help anyone who helps you or gets in your way.

I knew this was coming, because I wised up a couple of months ago and bought a book about this year of your life. I read all about the "I can do it by myself" phase. But I was unprepared for the way this phase is manifesting itself in your unique little personality. Kate, I love you, but I think it would be good for you (and probably your future husband) if we're up front about something: You can be kind of high-maintenance. Sorry. I can be that way too, so you come by it honest. In our defense, I don't think we're generally demanding people, but when it comes to certain things, we just "want it the way we want it" as Meg Ryan says in When Harry Met Sally.

Harry Burns: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.
Sally Albright: Which one am I?
Harry Burns: You're the worst kind; you're high maintenance but you think you're low maintenance.
Sally Albright: I don't see that.
Harry Burns: You don't see that? Waiter, I'll begin with a house salad, but I don't want the regular dressing. I'll have the balsamic vinegar and oil, but on the side. And then the salmon with the mustard sauce, but I want the mustard sauce on the side. "On the side" is a very big thing for you.
Sally Albright: Well, I just want it the way I want it.
Harry Burns: I know; high maintenance.

I could tell thousands of stories about how this has played out for your poor father who has to deal with me all the time, but this letter is about you, so we'll keep the focus there. For you, as a high maintenance kind of girl, it's all about the little things. Right now, you insist on having a plate for all your food. I think it's because we eat off plates, and you're very into doing what we do, but if I try to put your food directly on a high chair tray like you were some kind of baby, you refuse to touch it. You also want nothing to do with plastic beginner forks. You want a real silver fork, preferably sharp enough to poke your eye out. Sometimes you want to sit in one of the chairs at the table instead of in your high chair, and I am supposed to read your mind and know which way you want it before I start trying to seat you. You do NOT want to have your face wiped, your diaper changed, or your clothes put on you unless it was your idea first. The list of things you want to do in a certain way at a certain time goes on and on.

This means that as a mom, I am working on what I believe is called picking my battles. I am proud to say that you now allow your teeth to be brushed without being restrained or making me afraid that I will lose a finger. This sounds like a small thing, but I'm telling you, Kate, that was a two month battle. Two. Months. And it was worth it, because your teeth are important and I don't want them to fall out of your head. But I do not have months of my life to spend waiting you out on things that don't really matter, so the rest of the time I am learning a giant lesson in Letting It Go. This is a big stretch for me, to say the least. (Have I mentioned that when I was a little kid, my nickname was Big Time Bossy Britches? Yeah, I think I am getting some payback now. Your Gam is highly amused.)

Living with you is interesting in ways I could never have imagined even a year ago. You definitely get more challenging as you grow, but you are so much fun right now that I wouldn't go back to one of your previous stages for anything, even though I loved those at the time. It's really cool to see how your increasing grasp of spoken language combined with the signing you've learned really makes you able to talk to us in remarkable detail. You know your name, which you pronounce "Ate." You know where your ears and nose and mouth and eyes and feet are. You can pick Elmo out of a lineup from 20 yards. You pronounce it "Elbow" which is pretty cute.

You are developing quite an imagination. This mostly extends to Dangles the Monkey. Dangles is already a big part of our world, but lately, he has a busy life of his own to lead. He has to have a bagel in the morning, just like you. You have to put him in the high chair, snap the tray on, and give him a sippy cup of milk too. You hold it up to his mouth and make smacking sounds so that I know he is enjoying his breakfast. You insist that I kiss him goodnight when I kiss you before your nap and bedtime. And we recently started having to explain to you about how Dangles takes special baths that aren't in the tub, because one night, I caught you about one-half second before you threw him over the side of the tub so he could enjoy your evening bath with you.

You love to imitate anything that we do. You kind of insist on it, actually, to the point that I recently had to make you your own bag of makeup so that you would let me use mine in the morning when I'm getting ready. I filled a bag with a bunch of samples that you can't get open and gave you some brushes, and now we both do our makeup in the morning. This may backfire on me when you do figure out how to open those little jars, but for now it's a good solution.

I love it that you pretend like this, and it's really impressed upon me the extent to which you really do learn by watching your dad and I. I never realized that more clearly in these last two month than one Sunday when we were at church. Our church doesn't have a nursery during the worship service because we think it's important for children, even at your age, to be part of worshiping God with the church. It's not a really common practice, and it's one that's honestly hard to stick with at times. We've got a lot of toddlers your age in our church, and there are Sundays when it seems like you've all communicated via telepathy on Saturday night about the exact moment in the service when you will all completely lose it and start a riot.

We had been through a few weeks where you were leading that riot, and I was getting pretty discouraged. Then one Sunday, when we stood up to sing, you wanted to stand up with us, and you sang in your little way, which is sort of a wordless humming. When we bowed our heads to pray, you held our hands and closed your eyes and said "Amen!" at the end. (Awww-meeen is what it sounds like when you say it.) All this happened in a five minute span, and then you were right back to squirming and demanding graham crackers and trying to take your Sunday shoes off and the usual things. But I was so thankful for the chance to see that you are learning this, too. There really are no magical turning points in parenting, I'm realizing. There's just a lot of plugging along, trying to be faithful. I really won't know for a long time what that work will yield. But my prayer for you is that even now you will love the Lord and walk in his ways. That is the most important thing.

I love you,
Mommy

My sister-in-law Dinah took this photo when she was here last week. Obviously, it's mostly a photo of Kate having animated talks with imaginary people on Dinah's cell phone, which she swiped. But if you look closely, you can tell that it's also a perfect little impromptu family portrait. Kate's doing something very typical of herself, and so are Dan and I. He's on the computer, which is what he gets paid to do (sort of) and I am writing something. I'd like to say it was the Great American Novel, but it's probably just a grocery list. So in case you ever wonder, here you have a glimpse into the average day in the Wachdorf household. It's a good thing Kate makes it all look so glamorous and exciting.

Today I feel like I have passed a major milestone into being a real grownup: I bought a china cabinet. Not that having a china cabinet is really any kind of indication of maturity, but having 12 place settings of fine china and crystal packed in the Styrofoam peanuts it arrived in straight from our wedding registry has made me feel like a disgrace to genteel Southern women everywhere for the last six years, to exaggerate slightly.

Last night, I hauled all those boxes out and surrendered my kitchen to the Styrofoam peanuts so that I could get the china really nice and clean before the delivery men came with the cabinet today. It was quite an arduous process, since most of it still had stickers on it, which is another thing I would probably not admit to in public if I thought I had any kind of chance at ever being on a party planning committee for the Junior League. Things being what they are, I'll happily tell you that I've used the china for nice dinners on a few occasions, but having to unpack it, clean it up, and then repack it at the end of a night is enough to disuade me from using it even when it does occur to me to do so. Since it's been packed away, it's kind of out of sight, out of mind.

Hand-washing all of it last night and drying it to a nice shine, it hit me that every single piece of that set was given to us by someone as a gift when we got married. Really, that's true of every thing we used to set up our first place together, since if we had started with what we had when we combined our two single apartment existences, we'd have been in trouble. When I moved into my first apartment, my mom and I went and bought one of those 4-place-setting box o' plates and bowls from Wal-Mart so I'd have something to eat off of. It wasn't great, but it served the purpose. Flash forward a couple of years to the first day I was by myself in mine and Dan's new apartment, just a couple of weeks after our wedding, and discovered that Dan had apparently been living in this apartment for several months before I arrived and had yet to buy a broom. Who knows what he was eating off of. Needless to say, in addition to the beautiful china and crystal, the Target gift cards and matching dishtowels and kitchen utensil sets were also desperately needed. And people just gathered around us and gave us those things because they love us. It was humbling then, and last night, as I was washing all that beautiful china that is so fragile it's almost frightening to touch, it was humbling again. I don't deserve any of these beautiful things or the love that people put into giving them to us, but I'm thankful for all of it. Even better, now I have a nice place to put the china, where it can stay clean and hopefully make an appearance on my table from time to time. With the season of life we're in right now, when I do use it, I'll probably still be serving spaghetti and a bagged caesar salad. But it will look gorgeous.

Here are some pictures of the china cabinet, which I promised my mom I'd post. By the way, I have to indulge in some shopping bragging, because I found this china cabinet, which is an Ethan Allen piece, on consignment, and got a great deal on it. This really says less about me and more about the fact that there is a wonderful consignment shop just off Eubank called Consignment Interiors that has earned my loyal business over the years. They only buy nice things in great condition, and their prices are very reasonable. I've bought several pieces of furniture there, and it's pretty much my first stop now when I'm in the market for something. End commercial.

And from the front, with the lights on inside. I think it looks nice. And at least when every other dish in my kitchen is dirty, I can look at something that's clean and in order!

Lately we've been trying to get Kate to learn the first few questions of the Children's Catechism. We're not too intense about it, since her attention span is pretty limited. Mostly we just ask the questions and then answer them ourselves. Frankly, I feel kind of stupid. But every once in a while, Kate will actually answer the very first catechism question, I think because it's the only answer she can really say. The question goes like this:

Q. Who made you?
A. God. (Which Kate pronounces "Dod." We take what we can get.)

Or at least, that's how the Q & A is supposed to go. The other night, Kate was in the bathtub, playing with her toys and splashing around. I had gone through the questions a couple of times, so this time I just asked the first question and then paused and prompted her to answer me. Here's how that went:

Me: Kate! Who made you?

Kate: (long pause ... thinking): Daddy!

I didn't really know what to say to that one. I mean, she's not completely wrong, but I was hoping we wouldn't have to have that conversation for another few years. Wow.

And speaking of all things baby, head on over to my lovely and talented sister-in-law's blog for some fabulous news. Looks like Kate only has a few more months to hog that grandbaby spotlight on the Rice side of the family. Woo-hoo!

One of the fun things about Kate right now is that she loves to pretend. One of her favorite games is to pretend that she is putting her monkey, her Elmo doll and her baby doll to bed. Her favorite version of this game happens in our bed, and she gets them all tucked in before she settles down beside them. It doesn't exactly leave much room for Dan, since she tends to pick his side of the bed for this little tableaux and squawks at him if he tries to reclaim his spot. He's not at all whipped by a toddler. Not at all.