My younger dd is turning 5. It has been such a joy to watch her grow. Here are some things about little Z...

• She was born at 29 weeks gestation, weighing 2 and 1/2 lbs by emergency c-sec. Immediately after birth she cried...loudly!
• Never could get that baby to nurse right. I expressed breastmilk for 9 months. So, yeah, she was breastfed, but from a bottle! I always had trouble answering the nurse's question, "breast or bottle?"
• She didn't get her first tooth until she was 14 months old.
• She didn't eat solid foods until she got her first tooth.
• She learned her colors at an early age, because it was important to her that she could dictate what her color preference was..."I want the blue one"
• Even to this day, everything needs to be blue. Blue pony. Blue snake. Blue dragon. Blue this, blue that. Blue everything.
• She also likes rainbow and can tell you what all the colors are (ROY G BIV - red orange yellow green blue indigo and violet)
• She has such a great love for people. Sometimes its sort of embarrassing. Everyone gets a hug and kiss. She goes up to people she recognizes and says passionately, "I LOVE you!" We are always trying to explain what situations this behavior is inappropriate. So if my dd comes up to you and expresses her great love, you'll know why.
• She loves sparkly things and jewelry. We are also trying to suppress her strong desire to tell everyone that she likes their jewelry. She loves to compliment people.  She even complimented these big burly guys in the elevator that wore giant gold "rapper" jewelry.
• She is strong willed but in a way that is very different from her sister. She has her own agenda. When it was time to learn how to read, she brought a book to me and told me exactly how I was going to teach her.
• She likes horses, pegasuses, unicorns (anything in horse form, really), butterflies, bats, dragons, snakes, and the poisonous blue frog she saw at the zoo. She really wants a pet poisonous blue frog someday. When she was 3 and 4, she always said she'd be a blue flying unicorn or a bat when she grew up. We made big plans of building a bat house for her to live in in the backyard when she grew up.
• Anything she sees that she likes, she says, "draw me that!" She loves to have pretty pictures to color. But she doesn't like the pictures to have a background, or for the animals to be doing anything but standing there nicely.
• When she gets in trouble (even if we're really nice about it and don't raise our voices) she says, "will you say your sorry?" and then we explain that we aren't sorry because she did something wrong, and she understands, but then says, "now will you say you're sorry?" and then the debate goes on for a good long time.
• When she doesn't want to help clean, she can hide better than anyone. She's tiny and can fit in tiny places. She's also very quiet when she's hiding. She has given me many-a-scare when she disappears into a hiding spot.