Big

It happened overnight, I swear it.

Alexis is a big kid.  She has magically started to have the characteristics and mannerisms of a school kid and not a preschooler.  It was really the little things that I noticed....things like her asking me, "Mommy, do you realize that I have TWO glasses of milk in the fridge?"  (Do I realize...WTF?  Who taught her to talk like that?); things like her earnestly explaning to her father what was going on during Spongebob so he would be up to speed; things like her not needing her potty seat to poop anymore and wanting to wash her own body in the bathtub.

She still drives me nuts.  Out of my three girls, she is very definitely the most challenging.  She tests me at every turn; she does not perform up to what I think she should sometimes; she constantly turns over on their head all of my expectations and dreams that I have for her.  Yet, I also have had the easiest time in other matters with her.   She will avoid new experiences like Michelle Bachmann avoids acknowledging that conversion therapy is crap, yet she was so easy to potty train.  She has constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety about social situations and change, yet I never really had to baby proof the house because she never got into things she was not supposed to.  She constantly challenges my rules and the lines I try to draw for her (when I tell her we are going to clean the toys up then go outside, she ALWAYS says, "How about we go outside first and then clean?"  Always...) yet she desperately wants to please me and her father.  She is a bundle of contradictions and always will be...but before she did it in a way that was so young.

Now she possesses a maturity that sometimes astounds me.  She tries so hard to overcome her fears.  She tries so hard to be a helper and loves her baby sister with a ferocity that astounds me.  The things  that come out of her mouth...I had someone recently tell me that they love my Facebook updates because of the shit I put on there that she says.  Everyone who meets her adores her and says she is so cute and funny.  And all of this happened overnight.

I swear.