My Daughter is eight years old and counting.
1.She loves chocolate.
2.She pretends she is a dragon.
3.She says “Erdee” between words.
4.She has beautiful long strawberry hair.
5.She builds paper houses.
6.She likes to play by fighting.
7.She likes to cuddle.
8.She says she loves me the most because I am warm and cuddly.
I bought my daughter a chocolate advent calendar today. It was in the discount aisle of Walgreens. I know it is almost February but it was only 59 cents and she loves chocolate. She eats chocolate all the time. Maybe I shouldn’t buy her so much chocolate, but she loves chocolate. She doesn’t like brushing her teeth, however. Maybe I should buy chocolate-flavored toothpaste.
She spent most of the day today pretending she was a dragon. She pretends I am her owner and dragon trainer. She is sometimes a baby dragon newly hatched and she tells me to feed my dragon. Sometimes she is a wild dragon and she tells me to train my dragon.
She also pretends I am a dragon so she can battle. She wants to battle with me all the time. She roars and hisses like a dragon, claws and jumps around, I assume like a dragon would, and makes up lots of dragon names. She has been a dragon for over a year. The dragon names change but the story is the same.
When we went to the store, she told a stranger, “My name is Seraphia and I pretend I am a dragon and my mom is a dragon trainer and she has a firebird and night fury….” She is always telling strangers this wherever we go. Often times strangers do not understand her, so I have to say, “She pretends she is a dragon.” This is because she has trouble speaking and pronouncing words. She says “Erdee” between words like some people say “um”. She often hisses and roars at children she meets at the playground and always wants to play pretend dragon with them. When they do not understand her, I have to say, “She is pretending to be a dragon.” Some children will play pretend dragon and battle with her or run from the dragon with her. Others ignore her or run from her. She doesn’t notice them though. She just keeps on being a dragon. Sometimes I have to ask her not to be a dragon.
Because she likes being a wild dragon she will say she doesn’t have time to do things like brushing her hair. Much like brushing her teeth, she doesn’t like brushing her hair. Today she refused to brush her hair so I brushed it for her. She asked me to brush her teeth but I will not brush her teeth for her. She has beautiful long strawberry colored hair. It is also very fine and tangles easily. She fought me today when I tried to brush her hair so I had to put it up in a ponytail with some snarls left in. Once in a while, however, she loves brushing her hair and she brushes it for a very, very, long time.
She also spends a lot of her time building things. She is very creative and builds houses out of paper and tape. These houses have multiple rooms and levels. They have towers and gabled roofs. Even the windows and doors open and close. Sometimes she builds castles that have working draw bridges. Today she built a house and an outhouse because the house needed a bathroom. She has learned to measure all the walls so they line up and even measures the tape to make sure it is the right length. She makes all the furniture out of paper too. There is often cut-up paper all over my living room in piles on the floor and I am always running out of tape. I need to buy more tape.
After she built her houses we played Dogopoly and watched a movie on dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, she says, are like dragons, especially Pterodactyls. So she pretended she was a pterodactyl dragon and she wanted to fight. She likes to fight. That is how she plays. She will jump on me and claw at me like she thinks a dragon might. She is always saying “Let’s battle, I want to fight.” I am always saying “I do not like playing that way.” but she rarely listens. Sometimes I tickle her or wrestle with her. She likes to wrestle on the bed. The bed is soft and the floor is hard so I don’t like wrestling on the floor. This means however that I can never take a nap during the day without getting pounced on to wrestle. She is usually pretending to be a dragon when we wrestle.
She also loves to cuddle. We cuddle every day. She barely fits on my lap but she still fits. If she isn’t jumping on me to fight, she is jumping in my lap to cuddle. She said today, like she often says, “Mom, I love you the most because you are warm and cuddly” and that is the best.