Darin. Me. Approximately 500 screaming 3 year olds running in circles. Assorted parents. A petting zoo. Pony rides. The best goddamn chocolate cake in Creation. One of Fia’s gentleman friends declaring his love for her. Two uncles running assorted image capture devices. General craziness. Plus: the trash bin is already overfull!

My baby turned 3. We had a party. And what a party it was.

It’s 8 hours after the party started. I’m wiped out. She’s still going. I think this is why you’re supposed to have kids when you a)have more energy and b)are too stupid to know any better.

I’ll have pictures soon.

Sophia informs me: “My favorite ice cream flavors are chocolate and Tweety.”

Took me a little while to remember that the ice cream truck at the park sells “Tweety” ice creams.

Yesterday in the car Sophia was narrating our drive, as she so often does, and she said, “That car is like my car!” And indeed, another Honda Odyssey was tooling along slightly ahead of us on the freeway. Sophia, car enthusiast.

For those of you keeping track of my car purchases, shortly before Simon was born we traded in this car:

for this car:

And I am so happy we did. I love my minivan. I am such a suburban soccer mom. I was so amazingly happy to get rid of my SUV. They’re expensive to operate to begin with, and if you so much as look at a Mercedes the wrong way it costs you $1000. And it was small, so our family would barely fit in it—forget having a friend or two along with. A while back—a few months? a couple of years? time is not my strong suit these days—I read a tongue-in-cheek essay about the differences between SUV owners and minivan owners, and one of the differences is SUV owners want to keep their families insular from the world in their SUVs, whereas minivan owners want to bring the whole damn team along with in their van. And that about sums up why we wanted a minivan instead of an SUV.

Now we want to get rid of our gigantic sedan and get a Prius instead. It’s small, and not a good family car, but excellent for one person or one person and one child to run errands and, given how much our second car gets used, a hell of a lot cheaper to own and operate. Anybody out there need a dark blue 1996 Mercedes E320?

Anyhow, we were driving and Sophia was chattering on, describing everything she saw, when she said the following:

That’s where the pumpquins i–are.

Even a week ago she would have said “is” instead of “are,” but yesterday she switched mid-sentence. I don’t know how common this is during this stage, but I was astounded.

She still says “pumpquins,” though. Of course, I think this is insanely charming, along with “efelants” and “evelator.” I was sad when she stopped saying “dado,” which was her word for strawberry (and we have no idea where it came from). She says “strawberries” quite clearly now, especially when she wants them for breakfast or in her lunch.

I know: I should be happy when she speaks standard English. But little kid English is fun while it lasts.