The Kids These Days: 23 Months and 3.5 Years

Ah, the kids these days!  What can I say?  They are an unstoppable twosome of fun, silly antics, and amazing ability.  (Yes, most days I have at least one moment when I think I'm going to lose my mind or my cool, but I am trying to focus on the positive here.)

Ladies first ...

Miss Amalia is quite the character, as she has been since we first started seeing her personality emerge.  Multiple times daily she is described as "silly" and seems to embrace it wholeheartedly.  (We're not calling her silly like she's a nincompoop or something ... she's just so undeniably goofy.)  Funny faces, parrot-like repetition of words and phrases, and a need to ape whomever strikes her fancy that moment, she keeps us laughing for most of the day.  She's also starting to speak (pretty much) in full sentences, with her current favorites being:  "Ice too loud!" (in reference to watching Ice Age at my parents' house and it being too loud) and "I love you, too!" (rarely does she just say "I love you" ... even if she says it first).

She's amazingly polite these days; whenever you give her something or do something for her, she'll say, "Thank you very much!"  It's adorable and hilarious, and I hope it sticks for good!

Mollie is very curious and loves to empty things out whenever she can.  On the upside, though, she actually seems to enjoy putting things away as well; most days, she is our star picker-upper!

I say she keeps us laughing for most of the day because for the rest of it she often has us a bit on edge.  Mollie is most definitely a girl who knows what she wants and when she wants it.  She is prone to fits, but instead of kicking and screaming on the floor, she usually cries and walks away, then stages a "lie in" where she lies prone on the floor for a minute or two to silently voice her displeasure.  The crying at the beginning is often shrill and stressful, but I have to say her "lie ins" are adorable and almost always make me smile.  I can tell her teenage years are going to be ... fun.  Yesterday she walked around the kitchen in circles saying, "Run away, run away," and towing a blanket behind her.  I asked her if she was going to run away from home, and she replied in the affirmative.  *sigh*  Even at night when I put her in bed, she often has to pick up her Dollie and Sleep Sheep herself; if you hand them to her, she'll shake her head, sit up, put them past her feet, wait a moment or two, then pick them up with a smile and lay back down.  At first I was exasperated by her stubbornness and need for independence, but I'm trying very hard to embrace it and account for it in our daily doings.

Miss Mollie loves to count to ten, and does so on a regular basis, but I'm not entirely sure she knows what the numbers mean.  She also likes to attempt to say the last few letters of the alphabet, but she's definitely a long way off from really having that down.

How's the little man, you ask?  Well, Baylor is ... Baylor.  He's awesome and trying and wonderful; he definitely has his more Asperger moments when plans change, the noise gets too loud, or he is in a social setting, but the happy moments are definitely outweighing the not-so-happy ones these days.  He's such a loving, caring little boy; lately he's been spontaneously telling me that he loves me or that he missed me while I was gone to an appointment, he loves to snuggle, and he even tells his sister that he loves her on occasion!

This next part I say with a bit of bewilderment because, quite frankly, I can't really wrap my head around it ... Baylor can read.  Like, full-on, sound-out-the-words, read.  It's amazing.  Even if he doesn't know a word, if we tell him to try, he'll take a stab at it.  It's amazing and overwhelming all at the same time; what do you do with a three year-old who can read.  I tell you what you don't do ... you don't try to spell things around him (he can figure that out, too) and you don't leave things around you don't want him to see.  At this point, I guess I will just encourage him to keep reading, keep learning new words and all the rules I can.  (Why do I have a picture of an Aaron's truck up, you ask?  Well, he read it while we were waiting for a prescription to get filled, so I snapped a picture of it.)

How's potty training going?  Well ... not as great as I had hoped, I guess.  He definitely knows how to go on the potty and will often tell us when he has to go, but it's always at the last minute (meaning we have to sprint to the bathroom) and he refuses to go when it isn't a near-emergency.  A couple times lately he's had accidents a couple feet away from the potty because he has stopped to make mischief!  Seriously.  The other day he said he had to go potty so I told him to run to the potty and I'd dry off my hands (I was washing dishes) and be there in a jiffy.  I got to the bathroom and found him standing less than a foot from the toilet, underwear still on, a puddle on the floor, and him holding - and quickly unraveling - a roll of toilet paper.  Thanks, dude!  Hopefully he'll hop on the pottying-like-a-big-boy bandwagon soon!

So I guess that's what the kids are like these days ... in a nutshell anyways.  I'm sure I'm forgetting something, lots of things probably, but it's so tough to tell you about them when everything they do and are seems so daily to me.  Maybe I need to do this more often ...