Just So Three

It's tough to be three.  We've said it before.  We'll surely say it again.  It is especially tough when one of the giants surrounding you is your five-year-old brother who thinks he knows everything, and is always telling you that you are saying it wrong, or that something you've done isn't right.  Like this morning, when Julie and the bambini were headed home after collecting Joe at a play date at his friend Eric's, and Clara asked Joe, "Did you have fun out Eric's. . .[searching for it]. . .building?"  Joe said, "I think you mean 'at,' and it's an apartment."  Julie refrained from lowering her head to the steering wheel.  Clara, always so delightful--always sallying forth with the words she knows, and trying to ask after this or that, but yes, sometimes missing the mark.  Joe also always delightful--always trying to teach Clara a thing or two, but also sometimes missing the mark.  Of course Clara wants to scream.  She's trying.  He's insufferable. And of course Joe does wants to scream, too.  She's wrong.  She's insufferable.

Or there was the time today when Birdie started crying "because Joe is saying I not a birdie." Joe of course--of course--said, "But she doesn't flap up her arms up and down and fly!" For. The. Love. Of. All. Things. Holy. He's kidding, right? No.

And then there's the grown-ups.  Birdie cried torrents on Tuesday, our first cool day, which led Julie to lay out jeans and a short-sleeved tee-shirt. But you only have to be three to know that princesses (and princesses in the making) don't wear jeans.  They wear dresses.  And yet poor Birdie.  She's surrounded by people who think they know different and better on this point and so many others.

What a tender time.  A just-so time if there ever was.