Penelope has been growing into such a wonderful person. She has so much spirit and definitely makes our days interesting.
She has been turning into such a little kid lately, it's nuts. This can mostly be seen in her rise in activity level. Go go go. Always. Too busy for anything but play - she is always doing something. If you try to get her to do anything, she will even say, "Just a minute, mama - I'm busy. I'm too busy."
She has excellent manners. There have been a lot of pleases and thank yous... when she wants something, she asks, "may I?" ... there's a homeless man that sits outside of our library, reading with his dog (super sweet pair) and Penny stopped and was even polite enough to ask, "may I pet your dog please?"
She'll order her own meal at a restaurant and is always very polite to the waitresses.
She has been becoming more and more social. She use to just glare at EVERYONE, upon meeting, but now she'll wave and say, "hi" - if's a woman she's meeting, she still glares, but with men and children, she's very talkative. She LOVES men. There have been a lot of different guys coming in and out of the house lately to remodel the bathroom and replace the windows throughout the house and she is heavily infatuated with each and every one of them. We were at the park the other day and she even went up to a total stranger (the father of another child playing at the playground) and started leading him around the play set by the hand. Super cute, but scares the daylights out of me.
Penelope loves to sing and is quite the little actress - but don't be fooled, she does not do requests often. She's not that quick to appease. She's also not a huge dancer. I play music for her often and I dance like a maniac, trying to get her to join me... but to no avail. I learned by chance though, that Penelope has disco fever. Play some Bee Gees or Abba and you have a little dancing queen on your hands.
Penny freaks me out sometimes. She loves to cut things. I haven't gotten her a pair of real safety scissors yet so she can slice up paper, but she has a pair of play-doh scissors and has a few play knives that came with various food sets and she is obsessed. One of such sets in a sushi set - it comes with little, wooden pieces of sushi that velcro together and you can "cut" them apart with a giant, wooden cleaver. She loves that cleaver so much, she asks to sleep with it. She always asking to cut things and even asks if she can cut me. Little scary.
Penny loves to ride bike - both her on her trike, peddling around by herself or riding in her seat on the back of her daddy's bike.
She can count to 10 and knows her alphabet. She can even recognize all of the vowels (not that I planned it that way, those just happened to be the ones she recognizes).
She can draw circles and is hell bent on figuring out the square. She can recognize circles, squares, triangles and hearts.
Knows her colors, but rarely admits it. She thinks it's hilarious to say that everything is orange. Orange is her favorite color.
She eats her vegetables and she loves them. Raw or cooked - there are very few that she doesn't like. She has always been pretty good about trying new foods - we previously thought that she did not like mushrooms, but the other day, we were having stir fry and she stood up and picked them right out of the serving bowl and loved them.
Penelope can speak in full sentences - I love being able to have real conversations and discussions with her. Some are fun, but some are necessary to explain why she can't do certain things. Like why she can't drive or wear a bra yet. Why she can't cook dinner by herself on the stove and why she needs to sleep. I love being able to hear her perspective on things and love hearing her made-up, little stories even more.
She even makes up her own songs, which is the cutest thing of all. We paid a visit to my sister and her family in Arizona a few weeks ago - on the 6 hour car ride there, she started singing about boobies... went something like, " oooh Boobies! I like your milk! YUUUUUM!"
For quite a while now, she has liked to play with little animal toys - she has them walk around and talk to each other. This was something she developed pretty early, but she's expanded on it quite a bit in the past few months. We got her a doll house with a little doll family for Christmas this past year and she loves it.
She also likes to pretend to be certain characters from her books or movies or a certain animal. Often she is a baby kitty or a puppy. Both of these kinds of play are pretty advanced for her age level.
