It seems like age 3, so far, has been All About the Big Concepts.

Potty? Check.

Following directions? Check…if you are her teacher.

Love-destroy-love your sibling? Check.

But we’re still working on some.

Like the days of the week. Honestly, for a kid that knew the alphabet before she could talk all that well, she is having a really hard time with this. Almost every day she asks if it is Wednesday. Wednesdays at school they have music, which she loves, and pizza for lunch, ditto. So Wednesday, understandably, is popular.

This morning, she woke up crying. This is not unusual. I went in to encourage her to get out of bed and use the bathroom, and she was sobbing, “It’s not Wednesday, it’s not Wednesday!” I told her that it was, in fact, Wednesday and that she was going to have music and pizza today. Instead of turning her mood around, she continued to cry. “Tomorrow’s not Wednesday!” (Aha! Maybe she is getting it!)

“No,” I said, “Tomorrow is Thursday.”

“On Thursday I’m going to cry at school because I’m going to miss you,” she hiccuped.

“Ok,” I said. “Now can we please get on the potty?”

And then there’s marriage.

After the days-of-the-week hullabaloo was taken care of, we were lounging in bed, watching AM and Taxman starting to stir.

“Ema,” she said, “when I’m four I’m going to get married.”*

“Really?” I said. “Who are you going to marry?”

“Myself!” she exclaimed.

“Honey, two people get married to each other. You can’t marry yourself.”

“When I get big I’m going to marry myself,” she insisted. “When I’m 10.”**

“Isn’t there someone else you’d like to marry?”

“I want to be a wife! I’ll marry AM!”  AM, by now awake, sitting up and blinking, showed her a toothy grin. Oh dear.

“Uh, sweetie, people don’t usually marry their brothers. There must be someone you know you’d like to marry. A friend?”

“I know! I’ll marry Y!” Y is her first cousin. Her only first cousin, at least for the next 3-5 weeks.***

What will we tell the grandparents?

* Not random, I promise! In school they have been discussing the weekly Torah portion. We are smack in the middle of Genesis now, so lots of husband-wife things; Isaac & Rebecca; Jacob & his merry wives.

** Miss M thinks that being 10 years old is the pinnacle of grownupness because I once told her she had to be 10 to use a sharp knife in the kitchen.

*** My family has gone two straight generations without first cousins marrying. This doesn’t seem like the time to decrease the gene pool again, now that it’s getting so large.

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Additional funnies!

I set her up with playdough after school in an attempt to get a jump on my Shabbat cooking (book club tomorrow!). As I’m mixing sweet potato pie filling I hear, “Ema, can you be excused from your work and come see what I made for you?”

And then as I’m nursing AM I hear, “Ema, you will clean up my playdough and then I can watch something. Is that true? Is that the truth?”