This Crazy Girl

Cambrie cracks me up.

Right now, she is asleep in her bedroom. I have forbidden her to fall asleep at nap times now, since if she sleeps during the day we really battle to keep her in bed at night.

BUT I can hardly be upset, because she is asleep on the bottom shelf of James' changing table with a play-princess dress pulled over her like a blanket. On the shelf directly above her is one of her dolls, laying down with a box for a pillow and a plastic storage bag (contents removed, of course), pulled up to her chin. Bunk beds on a changing table. Cozy.

Using pics from last year since the camera incident.

She does things like this, and I realize I think she is awesome. Her imagination is on permanent hyper-drive, she giggles and squeals and smiles in ways that are impossible to capture on camera, and she goes around talking and instructing and narrating like a little adult.

She certainly keeps us on our toes. I can't tell you the number of times I've been mentally thrown off course because my little three-and-a-half-year-old says something like “I was wondering whether…” or “I managed to find the magical world…” or “suddenly I realized…”.

Even better? She is just as likely to say something like (no joke), "Mommy, when are we going to live in the faucet?"

??? See? Bizarre, random, imagination-laden and curiosity-steeped questions and conversations like this are the spice of my life. And as much as she talks and chats and narrates and asks questions, and as tired as I sometimes get of trying to keep up with it all, every night I go to bed feeling so lucky that I get to hang out with this girl, that she got to come to our family, and that I get to be her mom.

Love this girl.

Saying Goodbye

Only a few days after Christmas, Cambrie was able to partake in one of her favorite past-times. Four-wheeling with Uncle Rob.

Or, as she exclaims in her excitement, "Fuearwr-wheeling!" (I couldn't say it the way she does to save my life. Spelling it is no easier.)

Positively brimming with anticipation.

She's impossible to catch smiling on camera--UNLESS fuearwr-wheelers are involved.

Rushing in from her little ride, she hopped on both feet all the way across the kitchen floor. It was adorable, so naturally I broke out the camera to capture some of her joy.

Not my best move.

The camera slipped. Down it went, out of my hands, onto the floor, and directly underneath the Energizer Cambrie in mid-hop.

If I still had a working camera, I would show you a picture of our sad little Fujifilm Finepix J10, in all its 8.2 megapixels of glory. We got that camera when we were expecting Cambrie, since we knew we'd want pictures of our little girl. Four years later, when most cell phones were taking better pictures than it, it was still our little memory-preserving workhorse.

Fuji and I understood each other, you know? Like how I knew it would actually cooperate and take decent pictures if I got outside in indirect light, stood about three feet away, held it just so, froze the subject so it wouldn't move a millimeter, and asked the camera really nicely. And how it knew that Patrick and I are so cheap we would never abandon it for another camera so long as it was still in working condition.

*Sniff* Goodbye, Fuji. I may not have shown my appreciation as much as I should have while you were still with us. I may have expected far more of you than you were ever able to actually offer. But now that I have a seven month old who is threatening to climb our stairs, pulling himself up left and right, and getting himself stuck in the most ridiculous positions, I sure do miss you.

*Respectful Silence*

...

On an unrelated note, Patrick and I may have decided how to spend some of our Christmas money...