3 years

Due to all of the craziness, I didn’t get a chance to do a real 3 year post for Addie. I cannot believe she is already so grown up!

Then here she is last week!

     A single blog post could never contain all of the lovey dovey feelings I have for this little girl! It is nearly impossible to talk about her without it being some kind of bragfest, so I’ll try to keep it to a minimum—but it’s hard not to rave about just how grateful I am that Addie is my daughter.
     Now that two is over, I can say with great happiness that it was an adorable age. It’s been so fun to get to know her as a person more and see her discover the world around her and her relationship to it. We really didn’t have hardly any of the “terrible two” experience with her. Obviously, there were moments when contrary wills were expressed and all of that… but it really wasn’t ever remotely close to how difficult the twos have been made out to be. We’ve definitely seen a bit more sass and some tantrums going into three, but those are less and less frequent now that I have learned how to communicate with her better.
     So about Addie:

—She has a deep, insatiable love for Mickey Mouse & the Disney gang.
—She is all about playing on the computer. She can work a PC like nobody’s business and spends much of each day playing educational toddler games. She took off with it so quickly that we pretty much instantly set her up with her own computer station in our front room so she’d stop stealing my laptop. It is shocking how intuitive she is with technology! Even as a barely-two-year-old, she knew exactly how to navigate my smartphone and do pretty much whatever she wants on it. Seriously, I feel like I wasn’t able to do the things she does until I was at least 8, lol.
—She honestly isn’t a very loud kid. I mean, she CAN be loud when surrounded by family and riled up from playing, but when compared to other children (or infants when she was a baby), she’s pretty quiet and even-tempered. For instance, we have only ever had to take her out of sacrament at church one time ever for being disruptive. 
—She acts shy if someone’s around that she isn’t used to, but I don’t think she’s a shy person. She’s simply reserved. She surely got this attribute from Sam because “quiet and reserved” are not qualities that have ever been used to describe her mother. Sometimes it’s sad because people can’t get to know her right off the bat because she plays it so coy, but she’s very playful and engaging once she’s in her element. 
—Addie’s very independent. Even as a baby and toddler, she never really freaked out if we left her with a sitter or took her to nursery at church or something. She continues enjoying doing things on her own and I really don’t mind one bit; the last thing I need is to have to shake a toddler off my leg :) 
—Part of her independence is that she isn’t ever daunted by trying new things, this girl is SO brave! Her lack of fear for heights, bikes, and swimming makes me happy because it helps her learn so quickly, but at the same time it totally freaks me out because she’s not a very cautious (or safe) child.
—She’s really very middle-of-the-road when it comes to being a girly girl or a tomboy. She loves tools, cars, sports, and buzz lightyear every bit as much as she loves princesses, dress up, and playing house. We had a shamefully ungirly moment the other day when I asked her who a picture of the Little Mermaid was and she responded, “a sea lion!”
—Though she does appreciate pink, her favorite color is blue. She LOVES anything blue.
—She’s really all about counting and singing lately, it’s pretty fun. She knows 20 of her letters on sight (can’t pronounce the others so she avoids them), knows all of her basic colors and shapes, and can count up to twenty. She really likes to try to say the words along with movies that she knows well and desperately tries to sing along with songs despite a rather prominent speech impediment.
—She absolutely loves to dance along with music, especially if I play guitar and sing her songs for her. Unfortunately, her token dance moves strongly resemble the moves of Elaine Benes from Seinfeld.
—She is just over 40 inches tall and weighs 39 pounds, putting her at 98th percentile for height and 93rd percentile for weight. She wears 5t or little girl smalls and the first comment we hear from most people when we meet them and they find out her age is, “My goodness she’s tall!”; Yep, we know! Addie is tally tall. She’s got a good 4+ inches on any other girl in her dance class, despite being the youngest one in there.