"Spirited Child", a 28 month Lauren update

Lauren's asleep upstairs right now, which is a minor miracle, since avoiding sleep has been one of her goals the past few days. She avoided a nap today. Yesterday, she fought it but then conked out at the dinner table while we were out having pizza with Meredith and Gary. When we got home, she kept asking me "what's the lady's name? Maiwy diff! I like Maiwy diff!"and then she put a blanket around her head and pretended to be Meredith. (No, Meredith does not wear a shawl nor have pink hair!)

She likes to pretend to be other people, and is fascinated with acting. She likes to pretend to be Leora ("I'm Wyder's mommy! I gots a baby bwother in my tummy!") or my lawyer, Dave ("I'm Davey, I got a tie on, see!") Today on the way back from Trader Joe's, we happened to walk past a play rehearsal at Media Park and stopped to watch part of it. She was completely captivated. We wanted to leave after awhile of standing up, holding grocery bags with melting food, but Lauren kept begging, "one more minute." We agreed to take her back to see the real performance.

"Sool" is going well. I'm trying to help her with pronunciation, so now she can call it "sss cool" but she usually slides back into the "sool" sound. There is one problem there though, she keeps pushing two smaller children, Dennis and Claire. Lauren tells me "I no like Dennis. He is yucky." With Claire, she just hugs too enthusiastically and ends up hurting her. Today at Ikea, Lauren got bad at a girl who took a toy she was looking at (of course, this was Ikea, they had a hundred more identical ones for sale!) so Lauren shoved her and then immediately stuck out her hand in a peace gesture and said "Sawwy. I sawwy" but the girl was scared and ran away.

Ikea, for Lauren, is this paradise that she loves to talk about and visit. She likes it even better than Disneyland. Actually, we went to Disney a few days ago and she had an okay time but didn't seem all too thrilled to have to wait on lines. "I'm ready. I want to go NOW. I'm ready right now. I don't wait. I can't do that. I go up there. I go myself." She also got very upset that she was not tall enough for certain rides, notably the swings. I would not have chosen to take her to Disney at this point in her life but my 13 year old cousin Elizabeth was visiting and wanted to go, and Ryan's cousin works there and could sign us in for free so we went.

Elizabeth was with us for a week and is now staying the second week with my parents. Lauren took a liking to her and tried saying "Zidabeth" and "Ezibadeth" and then after a few days, told her "you are Coco" and called her Coco the rest of the week. She wanted to sleep with Coco and when she was tired and cranky, she said "Coco, go home!" but then when Coco left, it was "Coco come back!" Other places we took Elizabeth (and of course Lauren): the Getty Center, Hollywood Walk of Fame & Mann's Chinese Theater, UCLA, Santa Monica Pier, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Mulholland Drive, Greystone Mansion, and also she went on a Sony Studios tour with my mom. We were out driving in Bel Air when the earthquake hit, and none of us noticed it. The tram at the Getty was shut down when we arrived, though, and we had to walk to the top. At the top, we found out about the quake.