Letter to our 3 year 3 month old

Dear William,

On March 8, 2015, you turned 3 years 3 months old.  You are 42″ tall and weigh 42.8 pounds.  You are in size 5T shirts, 4T pants and shorts, 5T footed sleepers (although I think we need to start looking a bigger sizes in pajamas) and wear size 11/12 EW shoes.

Something that happened this month… after only 3 classes, I decided to change your dance class to a different teacher.  The first dance class you attended, you were excited.  The second dance class you attended, you were looking for a reason to take a break.  So, when three other little girls declared they had to go potty (despite them having gone before the class), you said you did, too.  The third dance class, you went in and were cooperative, but did so with tears running down your face for 10 minutes and then “had to go potty,” but nothing came out.  After reviewing the videos your Grandma D. had taken, I realized that perhaps the teacher’s body language could be viewed as aggressive and I had no idea what she was saying to you.  The biggest thing seems to be that Miss O. consistently reprimanded students for talking.  You claim that you never talked in class, that “Karis did” … but I wonder… you were “teaching” me how to “make a crown” and then follow through with “opening the sun” and I asked you, “Like this?”  And you immediately and emphatically responded with, “We’re opening the sun right now, not talking!”  After all that, I decided that perhaps a better “fit” might be in order.

I switched you to Miss N.’s class… and your Grandma D. took you to observe the class the week prior to starting, which was a fantastic idea!  The teacher came out of the room for something and you reported to me later that “Miss N. said she had to go back in and I said, ‘HA HA HAAAA’ and Miss N. smiled at me!”  The first class you felt you needed Froggy to help you.  The teacher said that was fine, and actually encouraged it.  By mid-class, Froggy was placed by you at the side of the room and you were interacting and doing your best to keep up.  I’m hoping this week’s class brings you laughter and that Froggy will be left at home!

Things you did:

02/09 – first dentist appointment
02/14 – Sea World
02/16 – LegoLand with Mommy
02/21 – Ryan’s 2nd Birthday party
02/28 – Breakfast at Chick-Fil-A with your godparents (a playground where the slide made no noise!)
03/07 – Santa Ana Zoo to see model trains

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, swim class
Tuesdays, pre-school library storytime
Wednesdays & Fridays, gymnastics at MyGym
Thursdays, dance class

Firsts:
02/09/15 – First Dentist appointment (no x-rays, their machine didn’t work)
02/21/15 – Rode tricycle for first time (and pedaled!!) at Ryan’s house
02/23/15 – First Swim class (with Miss Elaine)

Sleep:
You have not taken a nap this past month at all.  You now tell us that you can’t sleep when the sun is up.  Your Grandma D. still enforces a quiet time, and she rocks you for awhile… but you no longer fall asleep.  You refuse to lie down on your bed, instead choosing to have your quiet time on the floor of your room, in the dark.

Nourishment and Nursing:
We continue to nurse, although I’ve noticed a gradual decrease… you love your morning wake-up nursing session and you stretch that out as long as you can.  If we’re just hanging out at home, you have a tendency to cluster nurse in the mornings.  If we’re out for the day, you’ll usually seek me out in the early afternoon for a nursing session instead… I call it your “quiet time,” because it’s really just you regrouping yourself (instead of taking a nap).  We tend to seek each other out around 5 or 6 PM, and then your bedtime nursing is pretty short.  Not because you don’t want it, but because you fall asleep so quickly (because you no longer nap).  It’s said that child-weaned nurslings generally tend to wean themselves between the ages of 3-4.  I guess we’ll see how this plays out with you.

You eat well and continue to be somewhat adventurous when it comes to sampling food.  When we have soup, it’s quite adorable to watch you stack your spoon.  Every bite has to have a soup cracker and you’ll put nearly anything (except bell pepper) on the spoon with the cracker.  You’ll say, “I’m having potato and a cracker… Mmmmm, that’s good.  Now I’m having onion and a cracker.  Now i’m having a green bean and cracker.”  And on and on it goes.

Things I want to remember:

One of the things we tell you (to make you laugh) when you’re having a difficult time after dinner transitioning to the idea that we’re going home is, “I bought you dinner and stuff!”  Now you repeat it back to us and laugh and laugh. You just think it’s the funniest thing ever.

You like to ask me about the chores that I do, “Mommy do you have chores to do?”  Yes, I reply. “Are they home chores or work chores?”  Because sometimes my chores are about getting ready for work the next day, and other times the chores are about keeping our home running smoothly.  It’s interesting to me that you are classifying my chores.

When I help you clean yourself up, or help you wash your hands, or even help you with a toy that is challenging you, you tell me, “Mommy, you did a good job helping me.”

When we were at LegoLand on President’s day, you accidentally walked under the hand dryer in the restroom.  It triggered and a huge gust of air and loud noise burst forth.  You jumped and almost cried you were so surprised and you said, “Oh no!  Do I still have my hair!”   You later told me that Mr. Steve (your teacher at MyGym) doesn’t have any hair.  I’m still puzzled over the correlation of those two things in your mind.

You were humming the Cars 2 intro song and you stopped after about the 4th round of it and asked, with an impish grin, “When is the man gonna start singing?”

Driving home from Sea World you were eating raisins.   You were bringing them up out of the container and narrating, “These are fishies coming out of the water. This one’s a big whale.”  There was a pause and you added, “It’s just pretend, OK? Because they’re really raisins, OK?”

One morning, you said, “I need to go to the bank!”  Your father and I looked at each other in confusion.  I asked, “Why do you need to go to the bank?”  You replied, “To get stickers!”  Apparently, when you go to the bank with Grandma D. they give you stickers?  I’m still not sure of that one.

On Valentine’s Day, we were heading to Sea World.  As part of our conversation driving down there, your father asked you, “Where should we take mommy for Valentine’s Day?”  You replied, “To the bank!”

One evening, after a big dinner at Chick-Fil-A, and you not having pooped all day, we took a risk and went to the park.  Sure enough, a few minutes of running around and you requested your portable potty.  A few minutes later, you were all done, you got up, turned around and looked and exclaimed, “That’s my work!”

Listening to the Route 66 song, you said, “The music is telling you to turn west!”

You still get all excited when you see a semi-truck and exclaim who the trailer belongs to, whether it be UPS, FedEx, McDonald’s, Walmart or Target… those are the most common ones.

One night, I was talking about how tired I was.  I jokingly mentioned that I was so tired, I might just fall asleep in William’s bed and sleep there all night.  You paused and said, “Mommy? You go sleep in your own bed.”  Although, later that night when I was nursing you to sleep, you sleepily and sweetly told me, “It’s OK.  You can sleep in my bed.”

On my old iPhone, I’ve downloaded some of your favorite songs and an app called “Bible Stories for Kids.”  It’s really a great app and you learn a lot of Biblical details from it.  There are animations of characters that you trigger by touching them.  I use the app to keep you awake when we have our “reconnect” nursing when I get home from work.  One of the animations was a guy sneezing behind another guy and it blew the guy’s turban off.  You played that thing over and over and laughed harder and harder every time it happened.

Driving back from LegoLand on President’s day, we were stuck in traffic. There was a guy in a SUV in the lane next to us on the freeway. You stared at him for a good long while and then said, “Is he eating chocolate?” I looked at him and could see his jaw flexing repeatedly and replied, “No, I think he’s chewing some gum.” You replied, “No. He is definitely eating chocolate.”

One morning after nursing, you started singing this song, “When the sea lions get on board, all aboard! May I say scat? The lizards, and cattles, and kangaroos!”  You stopped and asked me, “What are cattles?”  I still don’t know where the song came from, but you told me it’s about Noah’s Ark.

When getting you cleaned up after going to the restroom, inevitably, your head always ends up in my armpit somehow. Every time, I hear you say, “I love you, mommy.” Which is always nice for a thankless job. Sometimes you’ll sniff and tell me, “Mmmmm, you smell so good.” One evening, you told me that and then added, “Daddy smells good, too. So does grandma, but actually she’s kind of stinky.”

One morning, you woke early and your father went in your room first.  After a few minutes, I went in and your father left.  You curled into me and stuck your face in my neck and said, “Mmmmm you smell good!”  I replied, “Thank you.”  You said, “Daddy does not smell good. Does he need to take a shower or something?”

Stuck in traffic on the freeway, we branched off to another freeway and went up a freeway overpass.  You yelled, “We’re out of traffic! We’re up high! Yay freedom!”

I bought you a new pair of shoes and you wore them for the first time and said, “I like my new chuggers!”

You like to put a spoon in your mouth and hold on to it with your lips.  You then inform us, “I’m an elephant and this is my trunk.”

When you don’t want to do something, you’ll say (for example), “I don’t want to!”  Pause. and then you add, “Uhh!”

One morning, coming downstairs with your daddy after I’d left for work, you looked out the window and exclaimed “Oh no!  It’s foggy!  Mommy might get lost!”

When we were at Ryan’s birthday party, Ryan’s mommy offered to make you a hot dog sandwich, since she was cooking one for Ryan.  You were excited to try it and when she served it to you, you took a bite of it and then said, “This is like Weinerschnitzel!”  What I forgot to tell Ryan’s mommy is that is a high compliment, indeed, since you LOVE Weinerschnitzel.

At Ryan’s birthday party, you got adventurous and went down his little slide on your belly.  You accidentally nose dived at the bottom and had a brown smudge on your nose. After I determined you were OK, I laughed at you and told you that you were Rudolph the Brown Nosed Reindeer.  You replied, “Oh mommy.  Rudolph has a red nose, not a brown nose.”

The road from your Grandparent’s H. house has quite a steep hill.  Somedays you’ll say it’s a roller coaster and put your hands in the air.  After we let you see the Disney movie, Lady & the Tramp, you howled “Woo wooowooo!” And said, “That’s what we do down the hill when we are doggies!”

One of the questions you ask me when I transition into “business mode” and am just trying to get stuff done is, “Why are you going so fast?”

One of the songs on Signing Time’s Potty Time DVD is about how you’re supposed to listen to your body.  It tells you when it’s time to eat!  It tells you when it’s time to sleep, etc.  The past month or so, you’ve started talking to your body like it’s a 3rd person… “We’re having a picnic, body. Are you hungry, body?” “My body is telling me it’s running around time!” “My body is telling me it’s time to play with the trains now!”

When we were at Yogurtland, I got you three of your favorite flavors, one of which is “Cookie,” which is a type of chocolate.  For myself, I got a different chocolate and I offered you a small taste.  This is rare, I don’t normally let you taste my dessert, but for some reason I did that day.  You tasted it and then, in turn, you dipped your spoon in your chocolate and held it up to me to taste.  I was so pleasantly surprised.

Your father was so impressed one night when, instead of running away from him to go to Sunset Park (our name for the grassy area behind the houses) to see the sunset, you asked his permission to “go watch the sunset, please?”

Your Grandparent’s H. bought you a framed train picture for your 2nd birthday.  It’s been sitting in one spot or another the past year while I tried to find a good spot to hang it.  I finally found a spot I liked it in and put it up.  When I got you ready for bed that night, the first thing you noticed and said was, “You hung up my train picture!”

At the zoo, there was a roped off area for employees only. You told me, “I want to go back there. What’s back there? So many places!”  I told you that it was for zoo employees only.  Then, every person who went past the rope, you asked, “Are they zoo employees?”  There was a little boy who ran past the rope and you asked, “Why is he going back there?”  Then his mommy ran after him, you asked, “Is that his mommy? Is she getting him? What happens if she doesn’t get him?”  I’m thinking this is your version of the infamous “why?” phase I’ve heard so much about?

Every night during our prayer time, we give thanks to the Lord for all the things that blessed us during the day, or in recent memory.  If there’s a special need or something on our minds that needs to be settled, we pray for that, too.  The things you like to thank Jesus for are mommy and daddy, Grandma D., Grandma and Grandpa H., MyGym, Swim class and Dance class, the Queen Mary and for precious time spent together as a family.  We realize that every moment with you is precious and, even if we’re having a hard time or a rough day… it’s OK, we’re human.  I apologize to you if I’ve wronged you and you do the same to me, and we tell each other, “I forgive you.”  I tell you that I’m learning how to be a better mommy every single day and you tell me that you’re learning to be better, too.

We’re in this life together.  Trying and learning… together.  No matter what we face, I am so happy that we are a family.

Love you forever,

Momma

Pictures from this month can be found here: LINK