falling in love pt. 3

i fell in love with this little girl, all over again

her self portrait checking her hair on my phone

again, this is not the kind of twitterpated love that we associate with love, but love nonetheless. it's amazing to me how kids change not just over time, but in different settings or when given individual attention.
princess grace spent 7 1/2 days with me and no brothers. there were cousins to play with, but she got undivided mom time. that's not really all that unusual for a home preschooler, but this was different.
she was amazing!
this 5 year old got 5-6 hours of sleep each night in a new place with new people and new things and she rocked it.
at the wedding she stayed out of the way. never really whined or complained. found cousins to hang out with and made it special for her.

probably her favorite thing of the whole trip was hanging out with her cousins. look at these girls. could they be any cuter?

when she had downtime, which she had plenty of, she occupied herself with doing things her own way. she loved jumping on the trampoline and became a champ at jumping off the "tower". 

when she wasn't jumping on the trampoline she was in the backyard or front yard searching for, finding and collecting potato bugs aka rolly polly's. pretty sure she collected over 200 of them over the course of several days. i learned she has very limited fear of her own abilities.

one of the funnier moments was at a pool party on memorial day. we crashed a party with my sister and princess grace swam the whole time. typical right, except not really. there were about 10-12 boys between 12-16 in the pool playing chicken, marco polo and doing crazy dives off the  board. then there's this crazy girl jumping off the board right along with them. they were totally respectful and it was totally funny. wish i had a picture of her, but you can enjoy a pic of the ladies chatting it up moments after we were splashed by aforementioned boys. 

falling in love is about gaining appreciation for a person and what the can and do add to your life. i learned during this great adventure with this little girl that she is fabulous and i totally fell in love with her all over again. i will remember to read this again during the days surely to come where she tells me how much she hates me and i'm ruining her life. i'll still love her then.