Motherhood y'all: Happy Birthday, Miss Priss

Tomorrow my daughter will turn three years old.

Allow me to tell you about her.

She is teeny in stature. She is both short and thin. She still wears clothes size 24 months. She has teeny finger nails that she insits I paint the same color as mine (she's not quite 3 and she is rocking some very chic gray polish). Oh and she calls them "neen-grrr nails." She has a small ski slope nose that takes after her aunt Lizz and short hair that has finally grown into a bob.

She has this teeny, squeaky voice...this voice that when she is happy you can hear the pure joy and innocence in it. And when she is tired and cranky and whiny she has the whiniest voice on the planet. But when she laughs, well, I'm pretty convinced her laugh can cure cancer and broker peace between Israel and Palestine.

But for all the things that are so small, so elfish about her, her personality is not. She has the biggest, bossiest, sassiest, charmingest, sneakiest, most mischievous personality I have ever seen. She is a politician. She is crafty. She will declare her edicts of love for you one minute and the next minute push you away. She hits her brother in private but cries in public that he hit her. She squirrels toys away where only she can find them. She is at once a tom boy - jumping off couches and insisting on wearing sponge bob underwear and at once a princess with her nail polish and demanding I blow dry, flat iron and hair spray her hair. (I don't always cave on that one.)

She knows how to be shy and how to be coy to elicit her way. But she is direct and bossy and demanding of the women in her life. She can flirt with any waiter in any restaurant. And both grandpa's? Forget it, they are knights in shining armor.

Her favorite moments of every day are laying on the couch with me in the evening while I rub her back. This is the only time she is still. She tosses and turns and snores and kicks in her sleep. In her wake she jumps and skips and runs and twirls and never stops moving. Unless I am rubbing her back.

Every night she insists on giving me, her daddy, her bubba and the dog about 100 kisses each. She shouts and she whispers "I love you." You goes to sleep screaming happily her love for every one she knows as she is placed in her bed. (Where she promptly climbs out and lays blankets on the floor and sleeps.)

We square off now, her and I, with each standing our ground. No, you can't wear shorts when it's 20 degrees out. No you can't have candy for breakfast. I imagine in 10 years it will be no, you can't date that boy or no, you can't leave the house in that mini skirt. But how I hope in 10 years and even in 20 that she lets me rub her back as she lies still in my lap. That she lets her mommy love her.

Three years ago my beautiful baby elf girl came to me. I love you to the moon and back Miss Priss, Miss-Chivius...Miss Sydney Claire.