There’s a little girl at daycare named Scarlett, who, besides being really adorable, is also quite the drama queen. She’s 2 1/2 years old, so I suppose it goes with the age, I don’t know. (I’ll find out myself soon enough.) When Cate first started going to daycare, Scarlett often cried more at drop-off time than Cate did. I’m pretty sure she was feeling displaced as the baby of the group, so it was a normal adjustment phase.

Once, when I was picking Cate up, Scarlett started to put her shoes on too (no reason why, her mom wasn’t coming for another couple of hours). So I jokingly said to her, “Oh, do you want to come home with me? That’ll be fun!” This caused her to throw herself on the floor crying. Oops. Patsy explained to her that I was just teasing, she wasn’t going to come home with me, her mom would be there soon, etc. And she was fine. See: drama.

Recently, Scarlett has suddenly gotten a LOT chattier. When I drop Cate off in the morning, I usually hear her inside as we’re walking up to the front door, shrieking “Paaaatsy!! Baby Catie is here!!!” Then she quizzes me for a status report on her mood. “Is the baby happy? Is the baby going to cry?” She’s pretty funny, actually.

(I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I always write her name as Cate, but I call her Catie in real life. I have no reason for this discrepancy, but there you go. Anyway, she’s Baby Catie at daycare to differentiate her from an older girl there, also named Katie.)

This morning, Patsy told me that last night Scarlett decided to pretend that she was Cate. She demanded that her parents and older brother address her as “Baby Catie.” Patsy asked Scarlett if she was a sad Baby Catie or a happy Baby Catie, and Scarlett said, “Happy!!” Oooo-kay.

Patsy thinks this is because Scarlett is sort of caught in between being a baby (i.e., still wearing diapers) and being a big girl (she recently moved out of her crib into a big-girl bed). I’ve heard of toddlers acting like babies, and that it’s supposed to be a normal developmental phase. I just didn’t know that they acted like a particular baby. In this case, mine. It’s a little odd, but it cracked me up.