Meet the Family: Rylan

Dowdy Lake, near Red Feather, CO. Aug 2010

Meet my beautiful daughter Rylan, age five.  She is my first-born, and is heavily out-numbered by brothers and boy cousins in these here parts.  She has a few females to rely on, but one lives in Florida, another lives in Oklahoma and one is just a baby.  So, you might think that she would have some tomboyish tendencies.  And you would be correct.  As long as tomboys can run around in princess dresses and wear pink cowboy boots at the same time, then we are okay.  Don't forget the tiara.

She is the most expressive and linguistically gifted little girl.  She will argue till she is blue in the face.  She knows lots of big words.  And uses them regularly.  She never forgets... anything.  She loves to play with Legos, Barbies, Disney Princess dolls, playdoh, cars, and fill her fifteen billion different play purses with 'stuff' and leave them all over the house.  She loves to ride her bike (still on training wheels), her Barbie scooter, and on the copilot behind my bike.  She climbs fences and rocks, digs for worms, plays with the garden snakes and stomps on ants.  She also chews her toenails.  yuck.  Her older brother taught her that.  (thanks, Jordan)

Rylan idolizes Jordan.  They make terrific playmates and are able to agree most of the time.  Jordan does a great job of involving Rylan in what he is doing - but he also has the bad habit of making her do the dirty work, like asking if they can play the Wii, after I have already told him "No".  She also loves her younger brothers - she has two now.  She fights like cats and dogs with Owen, except when Jordan is out of town.  Then she is queen bee and the dynamic changes quite a bit.  I often think about the dynamics and the whole 'middle child' syndrome.  With four, how does that work?  If three are boys, and one of the 'middles' is a girl, does that negate the syndrome effect because she gets a different kind of attention being a girl?  Hmmm.  She does dote on baby brother Colin quite a bit.  When I nursed him as a newborn, she would shove a doll up her shirt and nurse her too.  When I burped him, she would follow.  Too cute.  She shares a room with Colin because she is such a good sleeper.  I often hear her talking to him in the mornings, when they are both waking up.  I will often find her in the crib with him.  She will have already filled his crib with lots of books, and will be showing them to him.

When Rylan was about at the 15 - 16 mo. stage, she began a love-affair with books that lasts until this day.  I would place about 10 or so of her favorite board books in her crib at night, after she had fallen asleep, and the next morning, when she woke up, she would spend a good 30-45 minutes looking at her books.  I could hear her shuffling through the stack, making comments now and then... as well as any 16 mo. old can really express themselves.  As soon as I heard them hitting the floor, in a well-timed succession, I knew she was done and ready for some attention.  Funny, that hasn't changed much.

She is learning to read as we speak.  The program All About Spelling has done a magnificent job in presenting the phonograms we use, and she is starting to read simple words like a mad woman.  I predict by Christmas time we will have a full-fledged reader on our hands - yeah!

Rylan loves to dance.  Every once in awhile I will let her watch a snippet of Dancing with the Stars, and she will stand there, mesmerized.  She also loves to sing.  So do cats, but they do a much better job.  She prefers to do a private, operatic performance with her dolls.  She can sing about tragedy with the best of them.  I really, really need to record her on the sly someday soon, because I know this won't last much longer - she will get self-conscious soon enough.  Especially when the dog starts howling.

Rylan is also quite the artist.  She paints just about every day.  I have to buy a ream of printer paper at least once a month.  Lately book-making has been the thing.  I also need to buy more staples.  I constantly face the problem of "Do I save this??".  I've saved a lot of her firsts: a face, a body, first written words, first name, first portrait, first family portrait.  She drew a self-portrait of herself the other day as a grown up.  It was complete with breasts and a baby in the belly.  I told her, "Wow, so this is what you will look like when you are thirty, right?".  Rylan said, "No, that is too old.  I want to have babies long before then.".  Over my dead body you will, Missy!

I am so thankful to have at at least one girl.  I hate packing away her old clothes.  I cried and cried when it came time to pare down the baby clothes and give some away, donate some, sell some, and save the rest for a keepsake quilt some day.  I had such attachment to those clothes.  The boy's baby stuff I'm like, "meh", but the baby girl stuff really gets to me.  Even walking through a store, I gravitate towards the baby girl section and feel all sad.  Silly I know, but true.  She is growing way too fast.  I constantly tell her to stop growing, and she says that she wants to be a parent (her word for grown-up) so that she can drink coffee with me.  She is such a sweet and affectionate little girl.  She still climbs into my lap, she loves to listen to stories, and she will stroke my face or arm while I am doing so.  I know that the day will come, all to soon, that she won't want to do that anymore.  And that makes me very, very sad.  But it will also mean that we can do all sorts of other things that an older kiddo can do, so I try to just focus on that instead.

Rylan also comes up with the funniest, sometime bizarre things to say... if you have time, read the posts under the heading The things kids say...  That will give you some great insight into the way this little girl's mind works...
I love that girl!