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I’ve got a new post up over at HowDoesShe.com about pressing reset in your family relationships. It’s a sweet little trick that’s worked well for me.

Wanda is my best buddy. We’re together all day. When she smiles, I smile. When she cries, I sometimes comfort her. When I cry, she does not notice.

Wanda spends a lot of time writing lately. She writes her name (not actually Wanda) and her “impossible name,” a version of her name with about 20 other random letters scattered about. She recently learned to write “HELLO!”

Her “O”s are disconcertingly small. I find messages like this all over the house:

HELL.! -Wanda

Um. Hell. to you too!

Whenever anything good happens to Wanda, like having her name picked out of the singing-time bucket at church to be a special helper, she fiercely yells, “YESSS! I KNEW it!”

The direct translation of “I KNEW IT!” is “I had absolutely no idea that would happen but I’m really glad it did.”

“Someone just left a giant pink chocolate statue of Spiderman on the front porch for you!”

“YES!! I KNEW IT!”

“Laylee and Magoo have dropped out of school and will spend all the rest of their days feeding you Cheez-its and watching Diego with you.”

“YES!! I KNEW IT!”

“The whole world is now clothing optional.”

“YES!! I KNEW IT!”

She is fierce about everything, especially her style. All of her clothes are ninja clothes. If the pants aren’t jeans, they are ninja pants. If the skirt is worn by Wanda, it is a ninja skirt. Any item of clothing can be a ninja item if she deigns to put it on.

Wanda has pretend friends. Currently they are named MinLin and Federica.

Her hair is knots. Always.

Her eyebrows are acrobatic in their expressive abilities.

When you give her a gift, even if it’s something she didn’t know existed, she always says, “OH! It’s what I always wanted!” and clasps her hands together in front of her face.

She swims fiercely and is WAY too confident in her abilities. She is fast and extremely buoyant and refuses to use her arms most of the time. She is to Michael Phelps what a person who runs with their arms hanging down flat against their sides is to Hussein Bolt.

She runs like a cartoon character, lifting up one leg behind her and balancing with super hero running arms for a couple of seconds before taking off.

Wanda has learned from her brother that kissing is SICK and not in a “phat sick” kind of way. It is super gross. So, like Magoo, whenever Dan and I kiss, she says, “I didn’t see that,” even if she was looking directly at us when the saliva was exchanged.

The other night, Dan kissed me at dinner mostly just to torture Magoo, and Wanda said, “I don’t want to EVER see that again.” She then paused for half a second and said, “Do it again!” so that she could get her eyes closed tightly the second time around and say, “I didn’t see that!”

Wanda is super excited about tomorrow and often asks questions like the following:

“After I go to sleep and then wake up, will it be tomorrow?”

“Yes! I knew it!”

“Are we gonna have tomorrow AFTER ta-DAY?!”

“YES!! I KNEW IT!”

Earlier this week I kept her home from preschool because she had a cough. So two days later she asked to go to school and I told her I wasn’t sure if she was well enough yet. She said, “You let me go to school one time when I was a little bit sick and I’m just a little bit sick and if I cough, I will cover it… LIKE THIS!” She then threw her arm up with her elbow clamped to her mouth and her eyes bugging out of her head, like Dracula covering his fangs with his cape.

The eyes were a question.

The answer was yes.

Yes, Four Wanda. If you cover your mouth… LIKE THIS, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

I have a new post up at HowDoesShe.com, my newest blogging gig. I’m really excited to be working with these ladies. They run a quality site. If you haven’t been over there, check them out.

“The moments I whip through today are the same memories I would watch with rapt attention three or five or fifty years from now, were they recorded on video.

So, if they would mean that much to me then, why do I rush through them almost blindly now?”

[read more at HowDoesShe.com]

For me, the final straw on the back of my Holiday Madness Camel came in the form of the Shelf Elf. Everybody was posting pictures of their mischievous Christmas elves posed daily in the midst of elaborate hijinks. One day he’d be rigged up to look like he was hang-gliding over the toilet. The next he had messed up all the laundry one woman had just folded.

I saw the elf and, with a sense of dread, I knew that I had to get one… [read more at Familius.com]

Wanda knows that some things are real and some things are fake and some things are a little bit of both, like my “homemade” broccoli chicken bake, for example, or stuffed animals.

She talks a lot about her stuffed animals and their wants, needs, desires and personalities. Sometimes they argue with her and she vents her frustrations right back. But heaven help me if I try to get in on the fun.

Wanda: My animals LOVE this food.

Me: They love it? That’s nice.

Wanda (dropping her head into the palms of her hands): Mo-om! They’re just stuffed animals. They can’t really eat. They’re just bre-TEN-ding!

Me: So. They’re not alive? They’re just pretending to be alive.

Wanda: Yes!

People will see her at the grocery store dressed up like Spiderman or a princess.

Nice grocery store clerk: OOooo. We have a princess in the store today!

Wanda (raising one eyebrow and looking at her suspiciously): This. Is. A. COS-TUME. I’m Wanda Thompson. I’m just a girl!

IDIOTS!

At night, she sleeps with her “bretend” stuffed animals who can’t enjoy culinary delights because they are just real enough to play pretend but just fake enough to not be real. She also shares a room with Laylee.

One night last week Laylee had to stay up for some reason and Wanda went to bed alone.

Wanda: But I can’t go to bed now because I’ll be ALOOOONE!

Me: That’s okay. You can take Muno and Kangie with you.

She shakes her head mournfully, her eyes close to tears.

Wanda: No, mom. They’ll be alone too.

Me: So you’ll all be alone together?

Sad head nod.

Maybe the stuffed animals are suffering from some sort of fake depression, feeling all alone in a crowded bedroom. It would be a hard life for them, you know, if they were real. Which they are not. Duh?! I bet you believe 4-year-old girls are Spiderman, too.

A favorite family game we like to play is called Sorry Dad, or as some prefer to call it, Uno. We like it because it lasts for hours and the obvious imminent winner changes back and forth a kazillion times, building hopes, crushing dreams, and making at least one member of our family cry at least once per game.

The name Sorry Dad comes from the first time we allowed Wanda to “play” with us. Dan doesn’t love card games so it’s my diabolical plan to hook all 3 of my children on games early and therefore always have a full table for Rook when I have the hankering. Oh, and I get to hankering sometimes, as many a Southern Alberta Mormon is wont to do.

In this first game of Wanda-involved Uno, I would hand her a card and let her lay it down on the deck. Well, the first time I played a Draw-Two on Dan, I handed her the card and whispered, “Put this card down and say, ‘Sorry, Dad.’”

She laid the card on the discard pile and with one raised eyebrow, AH HOW I ENVY HER EYEBROW MOTOR SKILLS, she said with absolutely no remorse in her grinning voice, “Sorry, Dad!”

From then on, every card she played, whether it was on Dan or Wanda or Magoo, whether it was a zero or a reverse or a six, she would look at Dan as she played it and say, “Sorry, Dad!”

Dan took it like a man, a man that he is, and a new tradition was born.

Now every time any of us plays a card in Uno, we mumble those two words.

It’s very important to Wanda to place the cards in the discard pile herself, to dress herself, to NO NO NO I CAN DO IT! She is quite obsessed with her old and big bigness.

Last week Laylee had a friend over and the friend said, “Your little sister is so cute!”

Wanda considered this for a second, a troubled frown furrowing her brow and after a few seconds blurted out, “There are NO LITTLE SISTERS IN THIS HOUSE! WE ARE ALL BIG!”

Yeah, we are.

She’s not little because she’s BIG and BIGGER and she’s “a little bit six” but she’s still three until Subtember.

Today we were walking to the park, when some neighborhood dogs came running up and licked her all over. She did not like this. Stiff as a board, her face lifted high and to the side, she scrunched up her eyes, her mouth and her nose until they were finished with her.

“Mom! Those dogs were licking me all OVER!”

“Yep. You must taste really sweet.”

“No,” she said earnestly, “I do not. I am GROSS! And I’m all filled with brains. Dogs do not like to eat brains. They like to eat food. That you throw at them.”

Remember back in January when I got my trash kicked by a group of 3-year-olds at church? Well, the following week Dan and I had a planning meeting, aimed at finding a way to take the power back… in love, of course.

And with a few changes, things got better quickly.

Each week we do a camp-song-style roll call at the beginning of class, putting magnets on the board with each of the kids’ pictures. We also put their pictures on the backs of their chairs so there’s no need to wrestle for position, climbing over the chairs or picking them up and smacking each other over the head with them, in pro wrestler fashion.

We also let them choose the agenda. We put pictures on the board of all the activities we can do during our hour together and then they decide as a class what order we’ll do them in. They always choose to have snack first. And then they always choose to never have a lesson. So when “Lesson” is the only card left, Dan and I slip it in near the top and teach them while they’re eating and any other chance we get. You could call it sneak teaching.

Well things have started to go so well that this Sunday I was bragging to a friend, snapping my fingers around like a diva, “Oh, Sunbeams? We’ve got Sunbeams down.”

Even if there’s not a reality TV camera following you around, never snap your fingers like a diva and say, “I got this” regarding something that’s fully dependent on a gaggle of preschoolers cooperating with you in any way.

Cue the worst week we’ve had since week one. During sharing time, one little boy pulled up my skirt and nestled himself underneath it like a tent. As I awkwardly extracted him from my nether regions, attempting not to flash the entire room, he pulled back with a huff and then slammed his head forward, crashing it into my knee.

I pulled him up onto my lap and comforted him while the rest of the kids melted down all around us. He kept saying, “I need to go talk to my dad. I just have to tell him one thing. Please let me go talk to my dad and tell him one thing.” Well, his dad was busy and I figured he could wait and tell him after class. Eventually I asked, “What do you need to go tell your dad?”

“I need to tell him how you hit me in the face.”

Yes you do.

So, the day continued with much crying, screaming, jumping, tattling, refusal to participate, refusal to NOT participate even though it wasn’t their turn, and even a moment where my own personal 3-year-old was fake crying so loudly, I turned to my husband and said, “We should take her to her parents.”

We made it through and we still loved them, more in a You-Are-All-Children-Of-God kind of way, than a I-Wish-You-All-Lived-At-My-House kind of way.

That was yesterday. But then this morning, we had a last minute shift in our non-church-related play group that consists of essentially the same group of kids and subsequently four of them did end up playing at my house all morning.

Things went fine until about five minutes before parent pickup, when they suddenly got way too quiet in the other room. I entered to find them gathered around the fish bowls, where our Bettas “live”.

One was missing.

“Where did the fish go, you guys?”

Blank stares.

I looked all around. There was water on the sofa table and on the couch. That’s when I noticed that the red fish had magically migrated to the bowl with the blue fish. They hadn’t discovered each other yet, at least not enough to start devouring each other, so I grabbed the net and spent 5 minutes chasing them around until I could move them back into separate living quarters.

“How did the fish get into the other bowl?” I asked.

They all said a name, the name of the tiniest kid in the group, a kid who isn’t nearly strong enough to pick up one of those bowls full of water and pour the fish into the other bowl.

“How did you do it?” I asked him.

“I just grabbed it with my hand,” he grinned.

At least now I know who I’d want to be stranded on a desert island with. The fish grabbing kid. Have you ever watched Survivor, where they swim around with full fishing gear, harpoons, masks, nets, and traps and can’t catch a piece of seafood to save their lives? I am like those losers. Five minutes it takes me to nab one of my fish with a net. This kid? 30 seconds alone and BAM! He grabs the fish like Danielson chopsticking a fly.

Two weeks ago, our lesson in church was “I am Thankful for Fish,” and we took our little fish in a jar and learned about Jonah and sushi and loaves and fishes. We passed around the jar until they started shaking it like Darla. They LOVED THE FISHY! I guess this little boy really took the lesson to heart. He wanted the fish to be free to play with its cannibalistic friend. At least my little friend didn’t eat the fish, or put it on land to see if it was amphibious.

According to our class, Jesus is amphibious. He is amphibious because he can go on land and on water. He is also amphibious because I asked them to name some amphibious creatures and, odds are, if I ask them a question at church, nine times out of ten, Jesus is the right answer.

I would go to a different museum every day if that’s what it took to get Wanda to keep saying “Moo-zeum” in her cute little gravelly voice. Doing this, however, would require planning, hopefully on the part of someone other than me. Lately we’ve been compelled by external forces toward museums around Seattle and that suits me just fine. Point me in the direction of a cultural experience and I’m there.

Most recently Target hosted us at The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Chinatown in Seattle. Did I know there was a Chinatown in Seattle? No, although I had my suspicions. Did I know there was a museum there with a really long name? No, I did not.

But someone at Target was persistent enough to keep emailing me about a blogging event there until I actually read the email and realized it would be a cool way for my family to spend a Saturday, eating Chinese food and learning about experiences of people from other cultures.

“What if you were born in China?” I asked the kids as we drove across the bridge on Lake Washington in our borrowed Prius. The Swag Wag was in the shop.

“Hmmm…”

“Your spirit could have been born into a body in Japan or Korea. Isn’t that interesting to think about?”

Fuel-efficient crickets chirped.

“Well, stop reading and look at stuff.”

When we arrived, Dan breathed in deeply and wondered aloud if all Chinatowns everywhere smelled the same. He liked the smell. It reminded him of Chinatown in New York City where he served a two-year mission for our church. The kids fell immediately in love with the red and gold fish painted on the poles under the overpass, the dragons clinging to the street signs.

The museum sucked me in pretty much immediately. It’s a gorgeous space, thoughtfully designed with ever-changing exhibits created by committees of volunteers from the community. There is no curator at the Wing, something you would not guess by visiting it.

We snagged a few freebies from Target, who treated us to lunch and told us about the work they’re doing to give back to communities. I already knew they donate a bucket load of money to schools, but wasn’t aware of all the community groups and non-profits they partner with. Every third Saturday since 2008, they’ve partnered with the Wing to offer Free Family Day on the third Saturday of each month.

This Saturday it included a paper-making/collage activity with plenty of water and mayhem to keep my people engaged. When they mentioned that they do summer camps, I was seriously tempted. If it weren’t a million miles from my house, I would seriously consider it. A little multi-cultural immersion would serve my people well. Our town is rather monochromatic.

Honestly, it’s thrilled me this year that Magoo’s teacher comes from another part of the world and has taken a lot of time to share with them about her country and culture. He is mildly obsessed with her background.

When we learn about differences, the otherness of those we encounter, we inevitably circle back to the realization that we have more in common than we thought, that although each person and culture is unique, our stories share threads that bind us together in this human experience.

My kids enjoyed the scavenger hunt and the version of pin the tail on the donkey that played a lot like pin the facial features on the Asian Mr. Potato Head. They were inserted into dragons.

They bought ceramic cranes and lace fans and tried to get out of eating Chinese vegetables the same way they would work to avoid American ones.

I don’t know that it was a deep or profound cultural experience for any of them. But it was fun. And it made the otherness of the Asian American experience slightly less “other”. I’d call it a success.