Claire Bear

Claire Madison Ashby
We love this little girl. She is growing up too fast. Here are some things she is doing at 3 years old. She Loves to wear dresses. Every morning we will dress her in normal clothes and usually within an hour has already found a dress and either put it on over her clothes or has stripped down and put in on. She loves princess anything!
Going to the Disney store at the mall is like going to Disney land to Claire. She wouldn't know the difference. She has the most amazing imagination. In her world, dad is peter pan or prince Eric, she is a princess of some sort or Wendy and Mom if she is lucky is tinker bell, but usually she is the villain. The wicked witch is the most common. It suits me well....(tears) Claire also has a real good memory. She remembers the most random things. The other day she remembered how Lauren was in moms tummy and then the Dr. had to take her out and she brought a princess balloon to the hospital. It was out of no where, we weren't talking about anything closely related. She has always loved singing. At 15 months she could sing most of the words to probably 10 or more songs. She loves dancing like a princess but she doesn't have a dancing bone in her body. All she knows how to do is spin in a circle. It is very graceful though. Some things we have been trying to teach Claire these last couple of months are how to see a number and know what it is. We realized that although she knew how to count, if we showed her a picture of the number one, she didn't know what it was. So each week we have a number of the week. We get a white piece of construction paper and use tape to make the number. Then she paints the whole paper with lots of colors and after it dries we tear off the tape to reveal the number. We put it up on the fridge and all week we remind her what number it is when we walk by it. We are up to number 4 now and she seems to be doing very well. The second thing we have been working on lately is her coloring skills. I didn't realize how bad she was until I hosted a playgroup at my house and all the kids colored much better than Claire. Claire usually picks one color and before 30 seconds go by she is already done. She just scribbles all over the page. So these two weeks in a hotel I have been working with her on how to use lots of colors and try to stay in the line and color all the white spaces. She has gotten substantially better. We just need to work with her more. This Princess picture she colored all by herself. I think she did pretty good.



Some of Claire's sayings:

"Oh my heavens!" -I have no idea where she learned this, one day she put both hands on her face and said it. it was hilarious and now she says it quite a bit.

"Your riieaght!" - She says it just like its spelled. If she asks you a question and you give her the answer she likes, she always says this.

"Lo Lo hurt me"- Lo Lo is what she calls her sister Lauren. Lauren likes to grab hair, nuff said.

"It's okay..."- When ever Claire gets sad or hurt in anyway and she is crying and sad, if you tell her your sorry that she is hurt or sad she always replies with this. It is so sweet how forgiving she is and its one of my favorite things about her.

The other day Claire was pulling on Laurens arm and I told her, "that's Laurens arm, that hurts her, please don't do that." Claire told me that she wanted Laurens arm because her own arm was to big and she didn't like it.

Another thing we love about Claire is that she is so dang sweet to Lauren. She loves her little sister so much. We will see what happens when Lauren starts taking Claire's toys but for now, it seems like they are going to get a long great and be the best of friends.

Here are some questions that my friend Molly asked her daughter. I decided to ask the same ones to Claire and see how she responded.

1. What is your favorite thing to do? ummm... dance, dancing is my favorite.

2. What is your favorite color? pink

3. What is your favorite place to go? To where I eat pizza. (while here in Idaho falls we went to a pizza place with a big playing area. This is what she is referring to.)

4. How high can you count? 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,40!

5. What do you want to be when you grow up? Princess Aurora

6. What's your favorite movie? Peter pan, Diamond castle.

7. What makes you happy? treats makes me happy, go swimming is my favorite too, play outside, that's fun! Dresses! New dresses, a snow white one.

8. What makes you sad? waah waah. when I fall on the ground. When its really loud and it hurts in my ears.

9. What's your favorite food? ummm, ummm, eggs.

10. Who are your friends? I don't know, I guess!

I hope you enjoyed learning about our little Claire Bear. Here is a video I captured yesterday while I was trying to get a video of Lauren. Claire can always make you smile. Just watch the video and you will know what I mean. Enjoy!