Squirrel, in a nutshell

This is my Squirrel.

She is a most unique child. She possesses an almost elven, pixish aura. She is petite, slight, but she is by far my loudet child. She is quite possibly the brightest, most well spoken three year old I know. That is, when she chooses to talk. Squirrel is notorious for not acknowledging the presence of others. She won't talk to people she doesn't know well. She frequently hides from them. She has been known to run. This causes people to think that because she does not talk, she cannot talk. They are shocked the first time they hear her speak. I spend lots of time with her because the big kid go to school all day. We do many things. We play.
We put on puppet shows.

We cuddle.

We talk.
Sometimes, we talk late at night. She's been getting up at night for the last few weeks. She tells me the most unusual things. The other night she got up and we sat and looked out the window at the feral cats (that's another story). She looked at me and said...
Squirrel: I know what Mommies and Daddies do.
Me: Er, uh...is that so, sweetie? Ah, what is it that they do?
Squirrel: They kiss.
Me: Really. Is that all?
Squirrel: No. They eat food, too. And they look in the mirror and brush their teeth.
Me: That is absolutely fascinating.
We like music, all of us. We dance all the time. We have big band, opera, classical, disco, pop, R&B-basically our collection has everything from Gregorian chants to Bollywood. We have family dance parties (aka Mommy has to get some kind of exercise when she can't make it to the gym). We do this kind of Soul Train circle where someone gets in the middle and does a dance, then everyone does it. When it was Squirrel's turn, she hopped in the middle, started shrugging her shoulders and shouted:

"Do this, ya'll! Shake your hipples!"

I love the way her mind works. Appearantly she correlates shoulders to being similar to hips (which they kinda are, anatomy-wise. both have ball and socket joints) and they are close to your chest, where your nipples are located. Hence, we have hipples.

My sunny, funny little girl. My little squirrel.