Hadley. She is a wonderful, wild girl.
Sometimes I see so much of myself in her that it frightens me. The good (fun), the bad (opinionated) –it’s all condensed in one six-year-old package that I hope will turn out so much better than I ever was.
While she loves dressing up and looking like a girl, she does not like girl things. When I shop for her toys, I go to the boy section for dinosaurs and animals.
But on a recent (and rare) shopping trip to a department store, she was delighted to follow me around trying on clothes. We spent about a half-hour smelling perfumes, after which she signed, “I just love being a girl.”
She should totally write a song about it.
Hadley is a terribly complicated little thing who has loads of friends but is not afraid to tell it like it is, occasionally stepping on toes.
Or knocking people over.
Case in point: recess.
“I usually just like to play with the boys at recess,” she professed to me the other day.
“Why is that?”
“The girls don’t like playing my games. The boys do. They’re fun.”
I knew what game she was talking about. She and Bode LOVE Super Mario and his dinosaur sidekick, Yoshi. Haddie invented a game, Yoshi, where she (or someone else) chases kids around the school grounds trying to tag them whilst yelling “YOSHI HUNGRY!”
Gotta recognize the creativity in that kid.
Problem is she has allegedly recruited so many kids to play that it grew rough and violent. Another confession:
“Our teacher banned our whole class from playing Yoshi.”
I didn’t know whether I should be upset or proud.
We recently introduced the kids to A Christmas Story, my all-time favorite holiday movie. I’ve wanted to watch it since I babysat two of my rambunctious neighborhood boys and they announced they asked Santa for a BB Gun for Christmas.
Here’s for hoping their Santa’s reaction is the same as the one on the movie.
Hadley’s favorite part of the movie was when poor Flick got his tongue stuck on the frozen pole.
“What was it they said to dare him, Mommy?”
“Double-dog dare.”
All night long, she kept quizzing me, trying to commit it to memory.
I pray for the playground kids now that The Hurricane has returned from Christmas break.
I'm a Canadian-born mom of two, former Denver Post columnist, family travel writer, editor of MileHighMamas.com and 9News contributor. Expert on all things Utah, Denver, family and travel. Lover of laughter and life. Happily married to a man obsessed with growing The Great Pumpkin. 