Millie is the end of the line (as far as we know), and as such has the distinct honor of being referred to as “The Baby,” despite the fact that she’s almost 3.5 years old. Each time we call her this, she proclaims pretty loudly that indeed, she’s not a baby, she’s a big girl! And here’s the physical proof:

– No more diapers, not even at night (glory!)
– Can enter and exit an escalator unassisted (this is a big one in our family)
– Gets herself dressed (though her combinations are fairly humorous)
– Brushes her own teeth
– Rides carousel ponies alone (today I had my hand on her back and she said, “I can do this myself, Mommy.”)

Indeed, she’s growing up quickly. They all are.

The girls are watching Little Women right now and Jo just kissed Frederick at the opera. Chloe made the observation that Jo has now kissed two people: Laurie first, and now Frederick. She then looked at me and said, “She must have a lot of germs, huh?”

I don’t know why I never thought of this before, but I had to wait for Shannon to write about it for me to go, “Duh! So *that’s* what I’ve wanted to do all this time!” You see, I think egg hunts are super fun and the girls all have Easter baskets, but I could never reconcile it in my mind with the reason we observe Easter. Solemn, reflective time on Good Friday, rejoicing at the truth of the resurrection on Sunday, then hunting down colored eggs? How do these things go together again? Nevertheless we’ve done them.

Until this year. Granted, we didn’t go as all out as Shannon did, but we did do the whole egg-dyeing thing last night and then passed out the baskets today and had the big hunt this afternoon. It was super fun and I didn’t feel one bit guilty about it. We explained the change to the girls, who all whole-heartedly embraced the idea as well as our reasons. They enjoyed our celebration of spring and will hopefully be able to have a more reflective Easter.

The girls hate it when Craig leaves the house. Whether he leaves for the seminary, for his teaching job, or for a staff meeting at the church, they just can’t stand it. They usually gang up on him with one girl wrapped around each leg and two girls at each door barring his exit. Today they were in the process of doing just this, only they were concentrating on the back door. Craig told them he was going to go down to the basement to check on something and that he’d come back and fight through their fortress. They were ready.

But when he went downstairs, he sneaked out the basement door and cheerfully waved good-bye to them from the outside of the house. You’d have thought we’d burned all their stuffed animal friends, the wailing that ensued. And the trouble they took to lock the back door extra well was now their barrier keeping them from quickly getting outside to say good-bye to him before he drove away.

They started sobbing.

So I had to then break through their barricade to get outside to stop him from leaving before he pulled out of the driveway. I gave him a look that said he’d better get back in here because I wasn’t about to deal with the havoc of this for the rest of the day all by myself.

He did. He came back in and pulled the two sobbing girls into his lap and tried to explain the concept of a joke. They can dish it well enough, but they have a lot of trouble taking it. Hmm, you can save your commentary on that for another day.

Anyway, the conflict resolved, the girls stopped sobbing, and Craig left for his appointment the normal way – through the front door. But I have a feeling this will be one of those incidents that gets brought up in an office for $75/hour sometime later. Guess we want them to get their money’s worth.

My youngest has been a bit under the weather the past few days, running a low temperature and being more tired than usual. So I stayed home with her this morning while Craig took the other three to church. It was a jammie day for us, as I didn’t get dressed up to stay home with my 3-year-old. So I pretty much looked like I just woke up all morning long. Despite this, she followed me all over the house saying, “Mommy, you are so beautiful.” She did this about twenty times. And I loved it every time.

Tonight the girls were in the Friday night Parent’s Night Out the seminary provides on a monthly basis. We had a restaurant.com dining certificate to The Delmar and afterwards tried to pay a surprise visit to one of the pastors of our church because he lives pretty close to the restaurant where we were.

After figuring out that he wasn’t home so we couldn’t drop in on him unexpectedly (which we had expected because it was, after all, a Friday night and he is, after all, a single guy and he does, after all, live in a thriving city, so chances are good he’s going to be out…), we figured out how to get in the building anyway. We walked around admiring the architecture and the art and then rode the elevator up to his floor just for fun. Then we rode it back down again. Then we looked at each other and said, “What the heck.” Craig pushed “17″ and we rode it all the way to the top. Just because we could.

Could be that we wanted to walk around the top deck and see the city lights at night. Or it could be that we wanted to be the ones to push the elevator buttons without hearing an argument ensue. Who knows? Anyway, it was fun.