Journal Excerpt

She is shockingly tidy. It’s sort of embarrassing admitting your not-yet-two year old is cleaner than you are. She’s very particular about things being proper: all the stuffed animals sitting upright, all of us staying in our chairs during a meal, wiping her mouth and hands with a napkin in between bites (I kid you not). She likes sweeping and if I let her will wipe down any surface—my laptop monitor, the kitchen floor, my cheek—with a rag. One of my favorite things to do is watch her carefully search for the corners of her blanket so she can lay it down smoothly without wrinkles. And this with her “a germ a day keeps the asthma away” mother.

All of this orderliness does get a bit exhausting. She gets upset if her stuffed bunny falls over onto its side. If she has a speck of dirt on her finger. One of second-hand dolls has a permanent marker spot on its bald head and I can’t say how many times I’ve pretended to try wiping it off with a tissue. Once she got distressed when she spotted a mole on my thigh. I didn’t know how to say nevus in Chinese so it came out something like “this is a dot mommy was born with” which I’m sure cleared it all up.

She is also quite maternal. She likes to feed people, stuffed toys, the cats. She likes to brush my hair. She stretches out her hands and whines to hug everything, including birds in the sky and animals in a book. She’s adopted so many stuffed animals she names and refuses to go to sleep without that half her crib is filled with them. I’ve actually only bought her one of them, incidentally her least favorite one. I’m not sure where she finds them.

I attribute some of this to her being a girl, and secretly I enjoy it a lot.

We find out tomorrow morning if the second is a boy or girl.