of feet and failure

Gaz loves fingerpaints, but we have none at home. (I prefer to keep the mess at Nana and Papa's house for now.) She has discovered that she can use her Color Wonder markers to turn her hands and feet into stamps, and all without ruining her clothes and the carpet. She really loves making footprints, and now I marvel at how much work it took to ink her foot while she slept in order to get a print while she was just a few months old. Now I have to tell her "enough" when the page looks like a multicolored blur.

We've got a couple of good prints that aren't too smudgey, which brought on the realization that Gaz's feet really are huge. She has new, flashy Dora sneakers, size 7. We've always had to buy shoes for her based on the chubbiness of the middles of her feet, so I haven't been thinking so much about overall foot size. I can no longer deny that my little girl has enormous dogs. The mind boggles.

Gaz has a new favorite sentence: "I can't do it!" It is not my favorite, for obvious reasons. She runs into a problem (sometimes something we can fix, sometimes she wants to walk on the ceiling) and she disintegrates into a flood of "I can't do it," repeated ad nauseum, regardless of what encouragement or assistance is offered. It's simultaneously heartbreaking and annoying. We're still working on ways to defuse the I-can't bomb that don't exacerbate her temper that we're contradicting her.

On a happier note, she suddenly started calling me Doctor Mommy. "Sure, Doctor Mommy! Here you go, Doctor Mommy!" I have no idea where this came from, but it's cute and it's nice and it makes me forget that sometimes she "can't."