44 things about Maggie

1. She is obsessed by a fictional 13 year old girl detective called Ruby Redfort.
   
2. I took her and a friend - a fellow RR devotee - to the beach last night so they could swim and look for secret underwater caves.
   
3. She started cutting her hair to make it more like RR's when the holidays started and to make the chunks a bit more even, we agreed to chop it off. A relief as she doesn't like hairbrushes but wanted long hair.
   
4. She only wears trousers and she hates pink.
5. She used to like pink. Her five year old sister is obsessive about pink. 
6. She loves to read.
   
7. Her favourite books at the moment are the Ruby Redfort series, the Molly Moon series, and the Famous Five series. In Famous Five she likes George more than Anne. She thinks the first Molly Moon the best because it was the most exciting, and she went from just being an orphan.
   
8. Her drawings are and always have been highly detailed and decorative with curlicues and spirals and flourishes. Often in black pen but with small coloured patches.
   
9. At school she did a multimedia house for a spider with televisions and an invented favourite programme, and places for the spider and its friend to sleep and eat. There were fold out rooms and sections of paper to attach.
   
10. She likes Moshi Monsters. She got a Paper Plus voucher for her last birthday and spent it on the Official Moshling Sticker Book. She turns the pages of the album and asks me, which is your favourite Fluffy? What about the Beasties? Which Dino do you like the best?
    
11. She likes to sit on her father's shoulders and groom him by running her fingers through his hair and picking out debris.
    
12. She tries to do the same with me, please your hair is really dusty she'll say.
    
13. Pleeeease, is her way of begging. Eyes big. Voice low and urgent. Teeth bared, chin thrust forward.
    
14. She likes dead bees.
    
15. She desperately wants a puppy.
    
16. She doesn't like walking much.
    
17. She likes things the way they are, she didn't want us to get a new refrigerator because she liked the old one.
    
18. When she is sick she goes quiet and I feel terrified.
19. Sometimes she finds it hard to say what she wants or needs.
    
20. She is quiet and will sometimes not talk much and will be considered shy. I am nervous of calling her shy as someone said once something that I can't remember that made me think it was a bad idea to label a child shy. 
21. We talk of her sometimes finding it hard to say what she needs.
    
22. Her sister Alex is not quiet and sometimes we laugh together when Alex is performing and being loud.
    
23. With her friends she is bolstered and will make bold declarations and demands and be loud and impertinent. 
24. She and her friends talk conspiratorially and earnestly. They go into the bedroom and close the curtains and laugh.
    
25. They love going into the garage. Our house has a section and trees and flowers
    
26. In the children's shoe shop, with all its dazzling, she chose black buckle-up sandals.
    
27. She loves having friends over.
    
28. She loves sleepovers.
    
29. She loves parties.
    
30. She loves scooting. 
31. She loves her Paekakariki Granny's garden and planted her own but has hardly touched it since.
32. As a very young child she thought in colours, Mummy's work is purple, creche is blue...
33. She makes small, audience interactive books.
    
34. When she grows up she wants to make children's books. 
35. When she grows up she wants one or maybe no children.
    
36. My latest bribery technique is a pebble jar which, when full, will entitle the owner to a treat (in her case possibly Ruby Redfort stickers (which we will have to print as there is no RR paraphernalia). Tonight I said she could get a pebble if she got straight into pyjamas and brushed her teeth without asking me. She did both those things and also rollerbladed back into the lounge to breathe on me and prove her case.
    
37. She likes minecraft. She builds 10-storey houses in the trees. All her houses have a library and a place to read books.
    
38. She isn't interested in music.
39. When I was pregnant she was certain she was having a sister.
    
40. When she is sad it sometimes sounds like anger and I berate her. 
41. She climbs trees with cunning and delight. 
42. She likes cute things.
    
43. She is unromantic.
    
44. She loves bacon and she loves shrimp crisps.