Even though I haven’t really had time for blogging during the past two months, I jotted down a few Mara quotes now and then. Quotes I wanted to remember. Here are a few:
After we picked up my sister (“Aunt Mary”) at the airport, Mara burst into the house with more enthusiasm than I can describe, exclaiming, “Daddy! Do you want to meet Mommy’s niece?!?!?!?!”
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I’m learning that she picks up on a lot of the things I say, and repeats them. One day, while my family was here, Mara told me: “Today my day is horrible! My house is not cleaned yet. It is horrible!”
Yikes. Maybe I should be re-defining “horrible” for my daughter.
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Mara’s toys were spread all over the floor, and as she tried to get through, she said, “Excuse me, beads. Can you move along?”
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Recently Micah has been blowing “raspberries” all the time. For some reason, this really irritates Mara. (She calls it “beeping,” as in ‘Micah keeps beeping at me!’) So while she was on the phone with Daddy (who was at work), she said, “I don’t want Micah to be spitting at me and beeping at me. Micah needs to get a spanking. [There was silence on her father’s end of the line]. . . Daddy? . . . ANSWER me!”
Later in the same conversation: “We are sinners! We have sin in our hearts. . . I am reading the Bible, so don’t talk. . . We need GRACE! Come ONNNNNN!!!!!”
Wow.
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My dear friend Stephanie gave Mara her book A Pocket for Corduroy. In the front cover she inscribed, “To Mara Joy. From Kathryn Kuchle [Stephanie’s daughter, who is a year older than Mara].” Whenever we read, A Pocket for Corduroy, I read the inscription.
Yesterday morning Mara was going around saying “I’mmmm Kathryn Kuchle! . . . Remember the nice lady that gave me Corduroy?” So I told her that actually Kathryn was a little three-year-old girl, almost the same age as Mara.
Ironically, that day’s mail brought the Kuchles’ Christmas picture! So I showed her Kathryn Kuchle and her little brother Tyler. Mara carried the picture around saying, “Look! It’s Kathryn Kuchle!–She’s cuter than me.” And then she would ask random questions, like, “How do you spell ‘Kathryn Kuchle’?”
Then a couple weeks later, I overheard Mara telling Daniel, “See this chair? It’s from Tyler’s mother. And not Kathryn Kuchle’s brother Tyler’s mother. It’s from the Tyler down the street with the father named Bo.” . . . I just had to laugh, because she doesn’t really even know my friend Stephanie, or her daughter Kathryn, but she still includes them in conversation regularly (even more than I do!). 🙂
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Also, this should be obvious, but never tell a toddler about a surprise.
Mara to Aunt Mary: “It’s your birthday! And we have a surprise for you! And we’re going to have CUPcakes!” [It actually wasn’t her birthday. We were just going to celebrate while my family was together. So much for the element of “surprise.”]
Mara thought for a minute. She is going to be three on Christmas Day, and she equates “birthday” with “Christmas.” So she asked the logical question, since Aunt Mary is clearly old than three: “Will you be four at your birthday on Christmas?”