Wakey, wakey!

 

Happy Third Birthday, Naomi!

with her new "looking glass." She loves magnifying glasses for some reason. Now she has her own.

with one of her new books. This book caught my eye because of the Asian girl on the cover. Then I saw that it's about the ship-origami-story that Gung-Gung tells and I decided to buy it. Then I saw that it's signed by a local author. THEN I saw that it's by someone we know!

trying out the buzzle. It laughs at you if the wand touches the wire. Naomi is very dextrous, so I was pretty sure she'd enjoy it. The wire bends to make it more challenging. It seems popular with all ages.

The kids love decorating cakes, so we got Poh-Poh and Gung-Gung to order a blank one. They didn't really catch on to the idea of sprinkles. You are forgiven for thinking that the kids wrote the greeting. That was my handiwork. It's harder than it looks, okay?

Giving Kevin the stink-eye.

Ahhhhh!

Our birthday picnic turned out really well. It was great that the Hos and Chwang/Harrises could make it on short notice. The rain threatened but never really came, although I'm told it sprinkled around the time we were loading into our car. And the scorching heat broke, so it was more or less comfortable. Even the ice cream cake survived.

Check Ups

Adam and Naomi had their annual checkups yesterday. Clean bills of health and growth.

Here are the stats* for Adam at 4 years, 2 months:

. your child is 44 pounds, and that is
. at the 91st percentile for weight.

. your child is 44 inches, and that is
. at the 97th percentile for height.

and for Naomi at 24 months:

. your child is 24 pounds, and that is
. at the 15th percentile for weight.

. your child is 34.5 inches, and that is
. at the 65th percentile for height.

That second percentile doesn't ring true to me, mainly because our paed quoted 75th percentile to me and, I suppose, partly because her narrowness makes her seem so much taller.

*from http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/usefultools/l/bl_kidscn_calc.htm?gender=1&years=4&months=2&cwt=44&chf=3&chi=8&chi_percent=0&submitButtonName=Calculate+Percentiles

What a ham!

And then he insisted that I take a picture of the mirror:

Adam Behind The Camera

Adam was kinda bored during some of the games at the TUC Playoffs a couple of weeks ago, so we let him use my camera. with a little help so that at least it didn't get dropped.

So here's how an ultimate tournament looks through the eyes of a 3-year old. It involves a lot of knees, feet, grass, and sky. A lot of the grass and sky shots were left on the cutting room floor. You get the idea anyway.

Today, when I came home ...

from dropping Adam off at daycare, I found that Naomi had passed out asleep on the floor ...

right next to her father, who was home sick with a cold, ...

and that Adam had earlier vandalised our bedsheets ...

and that my anniversary present had arrived in the mail.

Sorry about the photo quality but I've lent out my camera and used Adam's.

Adamisms

Adam's speech is pretty clear and sophisticated for a 3-yo but he has a couple of expressions that I'm not correcting because they're just soooo cute.

Cheers. It means soft drink because the first time he had pop was also the first time he learned to clink glasses. He got confused. It's now the family word.

Let's have a little speak, meaning let's have a little chat.

Mommy, can you tension me please? This is the result of my training him to ask for attention directly rather than to act out or manipulate.

Can anyone think of other Adamisms I'm forgetting?

Working on his fake cry

You keep working on it, Adam. Cuz that is terrible.

City Boy

Adam is definitely a city boy. He can, for example, be worked to a frenzy by the presence of a mere fruitfly. He comes by it naturally. Let's just say that I'm the one in the family who kills the bugs and spiders.

Adam at the playground

This is What I'm Up Against

One "nap time" Adam moved the dresser off the wall, up-ended the playpen, and settled himself in with his blanket and Olga.

And if he didn't consistently flash that irresistable grin with impeccable timing, he'd have been banished from my queendom many moons ago.

Still, his room has been stripped of just about everything.

Meet the babies.

l-r: Us, Adam, Bob

Adam has really taken imaginative play to the next level. His stories for the people who ride his trains are becoming very elaborate, for example. He's also been doing a lot of caring for the babies, Bob and Us (pronounced "owes"). There are also soft toys in the entourage: a dog named Dora and a bunny named Chek. Us's name comes from a stamp on the back of her neck, though the letters are stylised and I think they might not be U and S. For one day though, Us's name was Kat. Us is always a girl and Bob is usually a girl, but not always. The major themes of play are dressing and diapering, sharing, and sleeping. Hmm. A little play therapy, Adam?

Reading! but not really writing

Warning: this whole post gets a mom-brag alert. Move along if you're not in the mood.

Adam is kinda reading. We've known for a while that he has whole-word recognition of many (100s of?) familiar words and phrases, notably streets and signs, subway stations, countries, food packaging, and words from his books. He's also been doing a decent job at guessing (often correctly) at a lot of words by sounding out short ones or keying in on the first few and last few letters of a long one or identifying roots.

For example, Dr. Lindzon was a little surprised when Adam guessed that the sticker he gave him said "Buffalo" when in fact it said "Beautiful." I didn't know he'd even heard of a buffalo. He's also mistaken "peau" for "Peru" but he got Millwood on his first try. I'm sure Dion has more examples, too. And yes, he has his favourite books all but memorised: he reads them to the babies (dolls), Olga, and Naomi all the time. But he has the meaning, too, because he makes "good" mistakes, e.g., replacing pronouns with the appropriate proper noun, using appropriate synonyms, never messing up the part of speech.

Still, I was a little surprised when he had memorised / could read back one of his birthday cards when I read it to him only once. So, when the next one arrived, I let him try it without any assistance. And he read thusly:

Adam's version	Original text
Hey, Birthday Boy	Hey, Birthday Boy
You're growing up to be fast,	You're growing up fast,
So get seat for something	So get set for some fun
Help your birthday's a [indiscernible]	Hope your birthday's a blast!

That's pretty good, I think.

He's also into figuring out how to spell familiar words. And he's on to the trickiness of spelling. For example, he's asked whether the letter at the end of cookie is e or y and whether a letter should be J or G, S or C, C or K. He also knows some letter combinations, e.g., CH and TH. Again, there are some amusing guesses. He thought drink (or some other dr-word) started with a J.

His books that are in heavy rotation: Llama Llama Mad at Mama (Dewdney), Little Pea (Crouse-Rosenthal), Duck in a Truck (Alborough), David Gets in Trouble (Shannon), Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (Viorst), I'm A Big Brother (blanking), Christmas Carols (STILL), and several Robert Munsch books.

But. He's not into writing (or drawing or coloring) for himself, though he is an enthusiastic spectator and actually he's a mini writing-drill-seargent. The only thing he ever writes is 1 - the numeral one. Sometimes he makes circles instead of random scribbling. And it's not that he lacks the deterity for writing. Trust me. You do not want to set him loose in your house with a screwdriver.

However, I did discover this morning that he had scribbled on a patch of wall; luckily, it was done in pencil. He even had the temerity to ask me to find him a pencil to do more writing on the wall. He got a talking to. Who knows if it'll work? This is the proverbial coming around of my going around as a preschooler. I had a compulsion to colour on the walls and furniture in crayon. I remember the angel and devil on my shoulders. I knew I would be punished. But I also knew that no punishment could outweigh the sheer joy of putting crayon to wall. I remember my parents scrubbing my bedroom for hours as we prepared to move when I was six. I need some kind of concluding sentence about Adam but I'm blocked. Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Happy Third Birthday, Adam!

This morning, I woke up to the sound of paper ripping. That was, of course, Adam opening the first of the presents we'd set out for him to find. It's like the train fairy visited our house last night. Poh-Poh and Gung-Gung, Uncle Ian, Uncle Norman (all in absentia) and Naomi all got Adam trains or train set paraphernalia. I wish I'd taken a picture of his opening the presents but mostly because I'm going to be writing this post as a nearly chronological recap of the day. Next, we played with the trains and made some thank you phone calls.[Aside: I could stare at this pic all day long! But there were also another half-dozen just as great showing his telephone persona, if that even makes sense.]

Then, Adam and I went to the grocery store to pick out a birthday cake. We had wildly different ideas of what would be good. Of course, we went with Adam's final pick, pictured above (after he'd been talked out of an individual serving-sized cake.) It was a very sweet triple-layer genoise filled with cherry preserves and covered in whipped cream icing with shaved white chocolate. Like I said, very sweet. Even Dion called it sweet. [Aside: That paragraph was for you, Beck.]

We took the cake with us to Plaza Flamingo, which is where we go for lunch almost every Sunday. This turned out to be a good call. Not only is Adam a little unnerved by deviations from our regular routine lately but also, Plaza Flamingo has Birthday Sombreros! Again, Adam was not so sure about the funny hat. In this shot, Dion's actually holding it above his head.

OMG, Birthday Sombreros.

Is there anything better than children in Birthday Sombreros?

They were so fabulous that a table of photography enthusiasts came over to take pictures of the kids. They kindly used our camera for a family shot, too. Later, we shared our cake with them.

Countdown to blowing out his candle:

We were even able to persuade Adam to nap after lunch with the promise of being able to open one more present after nap. We actually had to wake him up around 5:30 for fear nobody sleeping tonight. His big-ticket present was an easel. Chalkboard on one side, dry-erase on the other, clips for chart paper. Of course, the erasing is the best part. "Rub, rub, rub, it DISAPPEARS!"

Uncle Norman dropped by on his way to ultimate with some lovely cupcakes, commissioned from Julie's cousin, Catherine, who does this kind of thing for a living, I think.
I hear the secret is a stencil. For the record, these were my cupcakes:
His bedtime book was - appropriately, you will see - his small present from me and Dion, Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It's one I remember fondly from my own childhood and one that had been on display at Indigo a month ago or so. I have read it to him, at his request, every time we go to Indigo to play, which is at least weekly.

Adam, Naomi, Dion and I all had a great day. Thanks, kid! It was bittersweet for Adam and for me too. Adam was a doll today but he was very concerned about turning three. Dion picked up on this a few weeks ago when his behaviour was a little off - wanting to be treated like and called a little baby, which we indulged as much as we could. Turning three has got to be harder than turning thirty, or ahem, thirty-five. Adam was even having trouble going to sleep tonight.

When I went in to tuck him in again we had a little chat. I told him that he was three years old today because he came out of my belly exactly three years ago. He was my baby then and he is still my baby.

Adam said, "No, I'm not three. I'm two. Three is not okay." *heart breaks*

I told him that three will be wonderful and that he wasn't a big boy yet.

"When? When will I be a big boy?"

"When you want to be."

"I'm a little boy. A little baby boy," said Adam.

"Yes, you're my little baby boy." And then the night-time script, "I love you, Adam. 'night-'night. *kiss* See you in the morning!"

And he dropped off to sleep, softly. *sigh*