Calin is 3!!

I feel so far behind on our blog that I don't know how to catch up.  But I need to.  

We were only in Mesa for a week before Calin's 3rd birthday so we celebrated as a family and went to one of the aquatic centers down the street.  It was the last weekend it was open, so I'm glad we went before they closed.  (why do the pools close so early?!  It's a month later and still in the 90's.  They should at least open on the weekends right?!)

This one makes me laugh.  I don't remember why he was crying.  Probably because we were getting ready to leave and he didn't want to.

Lets see if I can do an update on Calin...

We started potty-training him about a month before his 3rd birthday.  If we didn't live at Disney World this summer, I'm sure we would have done it earlier, but I didn't want to be potty training a 2yr old at WDW.  So I kept putting it off until I couldn't any longer.  He was ready and it's been easy.  He rarely had accidents, but he would almost always "test" it out to see if he really had to go, so he would usually get a drop on his underwear and we would still end up going through 4 pairs a day.  Recently he's been super good about it though, and I rarely have to remind him to go to the bathroom.  We still put diapers on him at night, but he has only had 3 or 4 accidents at night in the past couple months, and he never wets his bed during naps. 

He's been able to recognize all the letters in the alphabet for almost a year.  And recently I realized he can sing his ABC's and only miss a few.  I've heard him count as high as 14 by himself, but it's usually 10.  For shapes he can identify square, circle, rectangle, triangle, diamond, and trapezoid.  He knows all the basic colors, plus a few others (like chartreuse, magenta, marigold, and a few more thanks to Blue's Clues, haha).

He likes to talk.  And he talks a lot.  And most of the time you can't understand him.  Jordan and I are really good at deciphering, but he pronounces many consonants incorrectly.  We've been working on it, and he can make the sounds, so I think it's more of just getting him to break the habit.  For example, instead of cat he says tat.  We practice pronouncing a hard c, but when we put it with the word, he says c-tat.  He has changed some words though, like yellow.  He used to say ye-ho, now he says yellow.  So he'll get it someday :)

Here's a video of him talking to us after going to Lowes (they had some Halloween decorations up.  The robot was a grim reaper, I didn't feel like getting into all that with him, I told him it was just a robot :)

His favorite foods are noodles with parmesan cheese on top, cheerios, frozen go-gurts, carrots, bananas, strawberries, grapes, peas, broccoli, nachos, string cheese, saltine crackers, smoothies, hamburger patties (no bun), apples.  

He's not a big sweets fan.  Sometimes he'll eat a cookie, but usually he'll say no.  He does love candy and fruit snacks though. Maybe because we don't have those as often as we have baked cookies and brownies and stuff like that around the house?

He LOVES puzzles.  And he's very good at them.  We have lots of wooden 24pc puzzles (the disney ones from Costco) that he started being able to do all by himself about 6 months ago.  

He loves to learn, and I wish I could have started him in preschool or joy school this year.  Instead we try to do "school" at home each day.  Right now his favorite thing is learning how to cut.  

This is his first cut & paste project. 

Here's a video of Calin trying to raise his eyebrows.  Just because I think it's funny :)