Goof ball

As a true 3-year-old, Rachel is starting to get quite a sense of humor. She thinks she is the funniest person around. It's fun to have such a happy girl around. (Especially the last couple of days--we've had weeks of horrible tantrums over every little thing, and for 3 days now, those have been cut WAY back, and we have our happy little Rachel back.)
Today Rachel decided that pretending to be laundry was the funniest thing ever.

She kept telling me that the laundry needed to be thrown away. And laughed so hard when I would try to throw her away. Or fold her up like laundry and stick her in the closet.

Up until about 3 weeks ago you couldn't get Rachel to color a picture or paint for more than 5 minutes at a time. And 5 minutes was on a good day. Then something all of a sudden clicked and she now LOVES to color and paint. It's fun to see her actually coloring (scribbling) her entire pictures from primary with all sorts of colors (before it would be just one color in one tiny part of the page). Here she's painting a hippo that we cut out and made into a paper bag puppet:

Rachel's other favorite thing this week has been doing treasure hunts. I draw pictures on post-it notes of where the next clue is and she goes in search of her special prize at the end (usually one of her toys). When she's done with the one I put together she makes up her own, and takes me on it.