Boys, diapers, and losers

Julia has made a lot of new friends at preschool this year, yet for some reason she has exhibited a crippling shyness in regards to the boys in her class. I find this surprising, seeing as the vast majority of her play-mates before starting school have been male, due to the large number of friends and family members giving birth to baby boys the year she was born. She refuses to even say the names of any boys in her class, claiming she doesn't know their names; however, she's not fooling anyone. She slipped up with me one day when we were looking at pictures of her classmates. In one picture, twins Lilly and Matthew were dressed up in their Halloween costumes; when I asked Julia who was in the picture, she responded, "That's Lilly and Matth-" then caught herself, turned her head away from the picture and said, "I don't know who he is." After being invited to a birthday party for classmate Cooper, Julia finally allowed herself to talk about him to us, but the rest of the boys remained nameless. Yesterday after school Julia told me, "Mom, today at snack I sat with Cooper and nobody else." Since I used to work at her preschool and I know that each snack table seats 5-6 kids, I was skeptical. I asked her if there were other boys at her table, and she admitted there were. After asking her if she would be willing to say their names if I said them first, she managed to shyly repeat each boy's name after me, and seems to have finally gotten over her obstacle; she is now openly talking about all of the boys at school without any issue. Why that happened to work I don't know, but I'm glad at least that she seems to have "unstuck" herself and has decided that the boys don't have cooties after all.

Speaking of cooties, I put Madeleine down on her play blanket, surrounded with baby toys, for a minute to run to the bathroom. When I got back into the room I found that she had maneuvered her body around and had gotten ahold of a new toy to rub her face against and chew on:

In case you can't tell, it's a dirty diaper. One that I apparently forgot to throw away after last changing her. Clearly it was much more interesting than her toys. Off to the left you can just make out the snout and foot of poor, spurned Dickie Dragon.

And finally, Julia just showed me the following picture in her Disney princess coloring book:




and commented, "Mom, I think this is Sleeping Beauty's wedding dress! Hey Mom, it's kind of like a loser!"
I'm sure Ethan would not object to his daughter associating the word "loser" with a Disney princess...