Meltdowns, monsters, and mutts, oh my!

Emily's determined personality, coupled with a natural need to control her environment, has been a challenge for us lately. There has been plenty of whining and crying fits that I hope she will grow out of soon. There is also a little contrarian in her that likes to see how often it can get away with doing the opposite of whatever it is that we want her to do, so there has been a lot of conversations that sort of go like this:

"Emily, get your shoes on so that Daddy can take you to school."
"But, I want you to take me to school, Mom."
"I can't take you to school today, so you need to go in Daddy's car."
"But I don't want to go in Daddy's car." (Insert whining here)
"Well, I'm sorry but Daddy is taking you to school today."
"But I want you to take me to school (Insert more whining)
On and on it goes.

Note that if this conversation had started with me taking her to school, then she would have been demanding to go in Chad's car instead. :)   So, we have been working on all of these challenges by pulling a harder line with her. Hopefully we can nip it in the bud pretty quickly.

When she isn't pushing our buttons, Emily continues to be very imaginative and creative. She is always busy playing some imaginary game, which seems to require our participation more and more often lately. She likes to assign roles and then have people play their part in the story. Again, probably a control her environment sort of a thing.

She also continues to be fascinated with monsters and scary stories. As for monsters, she got a Sully from Uncle Greg and Aunt Elizabeth for her birthday, and then got another monster when they came to visit this past weekend, so she is pretty well stocked up with monsters! Greg says that the blog doesn't really capture how cute Emily is, so I thought that I would post the song that she made up to thank Greg and Elizabeth for Sully (which I think is pretty cute):

As for scary stories, she likes me to tell her new ones all the time, so I have started a multi-part story recently about a little girl who visits the monsters under her bed and they get her to try all of the strange foods that monsters like to eat (it isn't actually scary, but she seems to like it anyway). So far the little girl has tried "pillow", "sock soup", and "hairball chili" (a dish that the monsters only make on special occasions because it takes so much work). She seems to like these stories, so I'll have to start thinking of other gross things that monsters could enjoy eating. Of course, part of the hair for hairball chili came from a little red dog that lives with the family (aka Woofy, our new addition).

As you can imagine, Emily is really enjoying this little guy. He is just the right size for her and he is really good with her. He doesn't try to jump on her, and he really doesn't lick, so there is nothing to torture her. :) She likes to feed him treats, and he is very good about taking the treat from her hand very gently. Sometimes he "talks" and sometimes he likes to show how he can stand on two feet. She really gets a kick out of these tricks and it is fun to watch her get excited about the dog. :)