Miss Independent

Coraline is the most independent child I have ever had. Today, her nursery teacher told me, "she is an observer." This is absolutely true. She watches what her big brother and sister do and then she wants to do the exact same thing. 

The last few weeks Reid and Nell have enjoyed a couple ice cream treats in a cone, and Coraline gets ice cream in a dish. I quickly realized this was not going to suffice. She kept trying to put her ice cream in her siblings cone wrappers or in the broken pieces of a crushed cone I gave her. So finally, our box had just three cones left and all her dreams came true. She got ice cream (really, a frozen fresh peach smoothie) in a cone. She was in heaven. 

And she refused to let me take the wrapper off the cone. I made the mistake of taking it off after she ate a piece and wasn't happy about it. She threw a huge fit. So I had to put one of Reid or Nell's old ones back on her cone. I figured she'd eventually understand it had to come off (although, eating it obviously hadn't been enough of a deterrent). She started scooping the ice cream out of the cone and was almost done when she finally realized she wanted to eat the cone too. So with just a drop of ice cream left, she did finally let me take off the wrapper without throwing a huge fit. 

She's also pretty independent about putting on her clothes. Whenever she sees Reid and Nell getting out their day clothes or their jammies she runs to her room and pulls out an outfit or jammie of her own. Sometimes, she's already in the appropriate clothing but that does not matter. She insists she gets a change of clothes just like them. She also insists on putting them on herself. The main problem there is that she wants everything to go on her legs. Here's a visual:

"Why isn't this working?!?! Oh, here's a tag, let me take a break and think about this"

"Oh yeah, I need to stand up! Nope, still not working. ... Oh, there's that tag again!

She's such a cute little stink bug! We love our Lou!