Little Miss Diva

Over the past few weeks Meera Grace has suddenly bloomed into quite the little personality. From the start she's always had blatantly apparent and noteworthy characteristics (most obvious was her calm and chill demeanor and her exceptionally "good baby" persona). But suddenly she's gone from being a baby to being a toddler, and with that transformation her little Self (capital "S") has really emerged. Turns out, she is such an interesting little kid. I'm not sure why, but this sort of surprises us. I guess when you adopt twin boys from a Haitian orphanage you sort of sign up for 'interesting.' But I guess we didn't really expect 'interesting' when we were anticipating the arrival of our little biological bundle of joy. Not that we expected uninteresting... I think it was just more that we didn't think all that much about what would make Meera, herself, unique.

Well, we're beginning to fully see the uniqueness that is our daughter. At 14 months old our girl fills the room with her graceful presence (she makes everyone smile)... and... her strange little ways (she makes Braydon, Kyle, Owen, and I shake our heads and laugh out loud). I don't really mean "strange" in a bad way, just "strange" in a strange way (I looked up "strange" in the dictionary before typing this, by the way,-- it says, "unusual, extraordinary, or curious; odd." And yes, that sort of sums it right up). Braydon and I regularly find ourselves kind of tilting our heads and saying, "Hmmm? How did she get like this?" And we're really just kind of stunned by the cold hard reality that we now have three (not just two, but three) really strikingly strange little kids. I'm not sure why we're so surprised. But we really are. And Braydon and I are feeling a little bit dumbfounded lately in our realization of this fact.

One little strange/noteworthy tidbit about Meera right now is this: She insists --and I mean insists-- on wearing necklaces every moment that she is awake. She lets us take them off before putting her into her crib to sleep, but otherwise, she's got necklaces on. I cannot emphasize how strange this is. I do not wear necklaces. Margie does not wear necklaces. Nobody she sees regularly wears necklaces. She's not exposed to media, etc. with images of people wearing necklaces. We cannot, for the life of us, really figure out where this intense need to wear necklaces came from. The only thing that I can trace this back to (and really, this is a stretch, but it is all I've been able to come up with) is the 4th of July... (click here for post and check out the photo at the very top)... On the 4th of July we made 4th of July themed necklaces with Kyle, Owen, and Sadie and all of us wore them to the concert/fireworks that night. In my recollection, Meera's interest in necklaces sort of started --gradually-- right around then. It was definitely the first time that she wore a necklace. And over the past few weeks since then her interest has turned into full fledged obsession. She must be wearing necklaces at all times. She turns anything she can into a necklace. And she has definite preferences for certain necklaces over others. The first thing she does when she wakes up is look for her necklaces (which are left where we put them when we laid her down), and carefully choose which ones to put on. She puts them on herself (we've never put them on her). And she has little piles of necklaces all over the place that she puts on and takes off throughout the day. Some of these things are just pieces of string, others are old school projects of the boys' (braided yarn "crowns" from last Halloween, etc.), others are elasticized hairbands of mine, and others are legitimate beaded necklaces that I've given her because she just loves necklaces so much. She wears them all, and she's always wearing at least one (but usually several). We don't mind her wearing the necklaces. We don't really have any strong feelings about it one way or another, it is more that we're just kind of taken aback by it. It definitely gives us pause... and... yes... gives anyone/everyone who encounters her pause. Margie thinks it is absolutely hysterical and says she's never seen anything quite like this with a child so darn young. All I know is that it is strange. Very, very strange. Not in a bad way. Just in a strange way.

Since we returned from New Hampshire this whole necklace thing has really been full-blown. I knew I wanted to post about it, so, over the past three days I made a point to snap 3 random photos of our girl at random moments during the day. Here she is... in all her glory... Little Miss Diva.