In one weekend we discovered that Aliyah's 5 year molars are coming in and she has a loose tooth. She'll be 5 in a month. What an exciting time!

My 4-year-old (Aliyah) is such an interesting and fun kid. She seems to really enjoy machines. She likes to draw factories and tell us how they work. She has a very geometric and abstract sense of art and loves to take "kids stuff" and turn it into "grown up stuff".

I'm really interested to see what she gets into as she gets older.

This is her laptop for today. I love how she worked out how to prop up the monitor and keep the page from falling. I know it's not genius stuff for a 4 year old but I find it really cool to observe.

"The woman playing my sister has man eyebrows" - David, referring to a film he's shooting today.
"Mermaids are half whale, half person" - Aliyah while playing in the bathtub, talking out some made up storyline involving a mermaid.

Aliyah playing some sort of pretend game by herself - "my life has not been squishy, my life has been hard"

Aliyah has this way of creating abstract and post modern drawings that goes beyond the typical "it looks abstract because really she doesn't have the skill to create anything that looks real". It's going to be interesting to see how it evolves.

We were standing in line at the post office the other day and Aliyah asked "Mom, do you ever wear panties? How about with pants?" Now, since I'm posting this on a public blog I'm obviously not shy about much of anything but there was something a little awkward about that revelation considering the creepy looking man right behind me holding the suspicious looking package who smiled a very creepy smile when he heard that little tidbit about my unmentionables (or lack of).

Aliyah has been asking a lot of why questions lately. This morning it was "mom, why are there windows?" I'm one of those annoying moms who replies with "why do YOU think there are windows?" She came up with all the reasons I would have given her. When I'm in a good mom frame of mind and allow myself to be present in those moments (instead of getting annoyed at the 300th why question in the span of 20 minutes), they breed precious memories.

Aliyah is almost incapable of using the 'r' sound. Because of this, Little Bear and Little Bill (2 of her fav. tv shows) sound exactly the same. So we worked out a code - she growls when she says Little Bear. LOL

It makes me chuckle listening to her sometimes.