Little Miss Keana is quite the sass-monkey. It’s not that she’s rude or disobedient, but the girl’s got some fire. The phrase “if you give them an inch, they’ll go a mile” was created for Keana. We are far from a militant household, but we have to run a pretty tight ship to keep things from spinning out of control.

Bedtime has been a big one on and off in Keana’s life, and it’s really interesting to see how her little ways have carried from infancy until now. For instance when she was 8 months old she would play with my lower lip while I rocked her to sleep, trying to distract me from the task at hand. The three-year-old version of that is saying things like, “I’m hungry!” even though she just ate, or (my favorite) “My eyebrows hurt!” Just about anything to delay sleep-time. Another interesting thing is I think she really got used to us all sleeping in the same space while camping, and she really liked it. So when we got home from the campout this year, sleeping alone in her room just wasn’t appealing. She would say, “Can I sleep with you guys” or “Can you just sleep on the floor next to me?” At first I would just lay next to her until she was almost asleep, but that evolved into waking up in the middle of the night, every night, to make this request. We finally got that one locked down and now we’re dealing with getting her to stay in her bed…ah the joys of running a happy dictatorship (i.e. parenting).

After saying all that though, Keana really is a complete angel and we still consider ourselves very fortunate to have such a smart, sensitive, and hilarious first born!