I made a New Year’s Resolution to post more about Mazzy and then last week, I was like— what happened to Harlow? I didn’t mean to make her disappear completely.

So today, I’ve got one of my favorite subjects to write about— what’s up with Harlow!

Harlow is hilarious and chatty and puts on shows for us daily, so it was really hard to come up with a list and call it “complete.” It is not complete. Not by a long shot. At three-years-old, Harlow is becoming a very complex little person who surprises me constantly so I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recount everything she’s done to entertain us in a single blog post again.

Harlow suggests this incredibly imaginative game at least five times a day. She’ll say, “Mom, can we play “Mommy and Baby”? You be the Mommy and I’ll be the Baby.” If I say “yes” which I almost always do, then Harlow suggests a specific variation of the game which corresponds with what we are actually doing. For instance, if we are eating dinner, she’ll say, “Okay, let’s play Mommy and Baby eat dinner!” Or if I am putting her to bed, she’ll say “Okay, Let’s play Mommy and Baby go to sleep!” Playing “Mommy and Baby” doesn’t actually mean she’ll eat her dinner or fall asleep so maybe that’s where the pretending comes in?

When we were in Jamaica with Seri’s family, Harlow turned to me one night while I was lying next to her in bed and said, “Mommy. Gavin and Luke have funny tushies. I saw them!” Then a few weeks later, after we had come home from our trip, I overheard Harlow walk in on Mike in the bathroom. “Daddy! You have a funny tushie just like Gavin and Luke!!!”

At some point, I’m not sure when, Harlow saw a video of a raccoon eating a doughnut. Now it is all she can talk about. Whenever she is hurting for conversation, she will volunteer, “Raccoons eat GARBAGE! One time I saw a raccoon eating a doughnut!” She says it so often, I even caught it on video.

On the flight back from Mexico, I sat next to Harlow while Mike shared the seat in front of us with Mazzy. Before we even took off, she picked up the inflight brochure and started leafing through it, stopping on the page with snack options and drinks. She pointed to the bag of chocolate chip cookies and said “That’s what I would like for my snack.” Then she pointed to the picture of wine glasses underneath and said, “Look, they have drinks just for Mommies!!”

Harlow proved to be an excellent seat mate for our four hour flight. She sang, she danced a bit in the aisle for entertainment, she shared her snacks, and played on her iPad independently long enough for me to watch the entirety of The Martian. But then during landing, we hit a ton of turbulence and Harlow clung to me, clearly terrified. I was scared too (it was really bumpy and many of the passengers were gasping at every dip) so the last twenty minutes of the flight were a pretty harrowing experience. I kept assuring her it would be okay as she buried her head in my lap, holding my hand tightly.

Then, at exactly the moment the plane hit the ground, I breathed a sigh of relief as Harlow simultaneously puked all over my lap. We were grounded for awhile afterward waiting for a spot to open on the tarmac so Harlow and I were quite popular with the surrounding passengers who I think would have rather died then sit next to our stench a second longer. She was wearing the only pair of pants we packed so we had to leave the airport with her wearing shorts, bundled in Mike’s winter jacket.

Harlow fell asleep on the car ride home so I put her straight to bed in what she was wearing. When she woke the next morning, the first words out of her mouth were, “I NEED WAFFLES AND PANTS!!!!”

For the month of January, Harlow was helping Mazzy sell Girl Scout Cookies door to door. After a few weeks of selling to our friends and family, Harlow asked a very important question: “After we are done selling Girl Scout Cookies to everyone else, can we sell some to ourselves??”

When Grandma Toby came over to celebrate her birthday, Mazzy drew her a portrait as a gift. Grandma Toby ooohed and ahhhed over the picture. Harlow, not to be outdone, promptly ran out of the room, returning about two minutes later with a portrait she made of Grandma Toby herself. Just as good, right?

Mike and I have never been that religious but this year, we put Harlow in a Jewish preschool, mainly because the schedule worked out better for us than her school last year. What we didn’t consider is how much of an impact our Jewish culture would have on a three-year-old. Harlow comes home singing songs in Hebrew and Mike and I have no idea what she is talking about. On Fridays, she’ll shout things like, “It’s shabbat! Time to celebrate!!! Where’s the challah???” which Mike and I find hilarious because neither of us celebrated shabbat growing up. In fact, almost every song Harlow makes up (she does this a lot) ends up being about shabbat. We just have to let her sing long enough and eventually she’ll get to the Jewish core of her song. I’m not saying this is a bad thing! Just very funny to us after not practicing for so long.

Last week, Harlow asked to wear pigtails for the first time in a long time. She actually calls them “pinky tails.” It was picture day at her school and Harlow remembered that she wore “pinky tails” last year for her school photo, so I guess in her mind, that’s just what one does on picture day!

Every morning on the way to school, Harlow passes this restaurant that has a coffee cart set up outside on the sidewalk. The cart is manned by a tall Asian man with a bouffant who is usually wearing a hot pink button down with a black vest. He’s a very striking individual and Harlow looks forward to seeing him every day. She’s never really talked to him, she just screams, “THAT’S MY GUY!!!” and points to him as we pass.

Harlow likes to nickname everything with an “ie” at the end. So right now, her favorite stuffed animal is “Dolphinie.” She also has a dog named “coffee” so she’ll often run around saying things like, “Where’s my coffee???” which sounds oddly similar to me. Then she’ll come up to me and say, “Kiss Coffee, Mommy! He’s your best friend!” She’s not wrong.

Harlow is at the stage of childhood where she likes girls much better than boys, often instituting a “girls only” policy when we do things like sit down for dinner which doesn’t work out so well for Mike. The other day she said, “Boys aren’t pretty because they don’t have eyelashes.” I said that boys do have eyelashes and questioned why she would say that. “Drawings of boys don’t have eyelashes,” she responded, which is a pretty good observation for a three-year-old. I pointed out that Daddy has very nice eyelashes. So she thought about it and said, “Daddy isn’t pretty, except for his eyelashes.”

When Harlow wakes up really early and it’s still dark outside, she’ll ask to watch TV or her iPad but then scream, “It’s too bright! Get my sunglasses!!!!”

When Mazzy was little, Mike and I had a goodbye tradition with her where we would give a hug, a kiss and then noses. We continued the tradition with Harlow, but in the interest of prolonging our goodbye, Harlow continually adds more steps to the mix, with a particular name for each step which she calls out to make sure you get it right. If you get ahead of her and do it in the wrong order, you have to start from the beginning and do it all over again. Currently, the steps are— hug, kiss, noses, eye kisses, love pats, little tickles and crowns (placement of a pretend crown on top of your head). She must do it to each one of us every time we part ways.

I have to say, even if I have to do it five times before Harlow approves and I’m allowed to walk out the door, it’s still my favorite part of the day.