A Bean Update

I feel like I’m not doing a very thorough job of keeping record of the Bean’s life so far.  She’s been growing in leaps and bounds lately and I can barely keep up.  So, in the interest of just getting it down so I don’t forget, here is a list.

Language

1. She recently started using a 4 word sentence: “I wah moh ee” (I want more please).  When I try to coach her to say I want _____ please (like park or outside or down), she always says “moh” with utmost pride at being able to fill in the blank.
2. She sings a lot, and more and more often I can recognize the tune.
3. She can approximate most of the letters of the alphabet, and one of her favourite games is to sort through a pile of wooden letter magnets and guess what letter each is.
4. She tries to count when she puts things in her bowl or when we’re reading books.  Usually, she starts with “nye” (nine) unless prompted to say “wuh” (one)
5. She sometimes gets frustrated and just starts screaming and crying when she wants something.  When that happens, she’s almost always hungry or tired. It feels good to have figured that out.
6. She understands so much of what we say to her.  I think once her mouth figures out how to do the talking, she will astound us with what she knows.

Her first big “boo boo”.

Physical Development

1. She can climb to the top of the play structure at the elementary school by herself.   At preschool, she can climb to the top of their smaller structure and slide down the slide on her own.
2. She can navigate almost any surface with her walker, and she’s starting to experiment with balancing on her own and taking a couple tiny fast steps with no help. She’ll start Physical Therapy again next week, so I expect this will start to explode for her.
3. She recently fell down and scraped her face up pretty badly.  It was swollen for the first 24 hours, and the scabs looked terrible for a few days, but she was a champ and healed up really quickly.  Right after I cleaned up her fresh wound, tears still streaming down her face, she wanted to get back into her walker and go see the pigs we were  headed toward at the farm we were visiting.
4. She loves to bop to music and she’s starting to do this standing up as well.  She’s been dancing sitting down for a while already.

General Development

1. She’s doing a lot more independent play.   She loves to play with her doll house in the kitchen while I make dinner.
2. She wants to help with the laundry, dishes and food prep.  She stands on a kitchen chair at the sink and plays in a bowl of cold water that I’ve placed in the second sink for her.  But her hands and the clean dishes often end up back in the hot soapy water, which means a lot of extra rinsing for me.  It’s still fun to be able to do dishes with her instead of fighting for some time on my own to do them.
3. 

   The Bean loved having her hair blow dried.

   We got her hair cut for the first time recently.  She did great in the hairdresser’s chair and wanted “moe” when the hairdresser blow dried her hair.

Sleeping

1. We’re finally starting to get some sleep at night.  She resists going to bed, so I often have to take her for a walk or a drive in the car to get her to sleep.  We’ve also been giving her melatonin some nights if it seems like she’s going to be wired for sound all evening.  She wakes up in the middle of the night (the time varies greatly) at which point we just pull her into bed with us.  Then she sleeps until at least 7am, which means her parents also get to sleep.  It’s been wonderful to get more than 5 hours of sleep on a consistent basis, and while it’s not ideal to have her in our bed, it’s working for us right now.
2. She often falls asleep in the bus on her way home from school, although lately that’s happening less often.  Recently, I started trying to have her down for her nap between 1:30 and 2pm, and only let her sleep about an hour.  This seems to be helping with the going to bed end of things.

School

1. The Bean LOVES school!  She has so much fun playing with the other kids and doing all the activities.  I currently drop her off at school in the morning, and then she takes the bus home.  They have 5-point harnesses built into some of the bus seats, and she really enjoys taking the bus like a big girl.
2. We signed up for summer school, and a good friend of ours is going to be one of her teacher’s assistants for a couple weeks in the summer semester.  The Bean is going to be so surprised on Monday when she sees her there.

Social

1. She is starting to get excited to see her favourite friends.  It’s cute to see all the kids get excited to see her when she gets to school or daycare.  A couple of her classmates regularly give her a hug when she gets to school.  She’s starting to let them hug her – at first she resisted a little.
2. We’ve been getting together with a couple of friends weekly.  The Bean is learning to share her toys and ask nicely when she wants something her friend is playing with.  This is a process, and we’re just at the beginning.

Three is a really fun age.  It’s fun to see how the Bean is keeping up with her peers, and also interesting to see where she still needs to catch up.  Right now, she feels like a 18-24 month old in many areas.  And yet she also feels like a baby a lot of the time.  We haven’t started potty training yet, and she still needs help with a lot of things, but she is so independent about other things.  She hates it when I try to help her with something that she wants to figure out for herself.  Our life is an exaggerated example of how every child develops on their own schedule, regardless of the average.  And it’s “awedome” (awesome).