Finley Cate, 3 years old

 

Finley just turned 3 on January 7th.

Her Days:

• She stays at home with me while Grayson is at preschool, where she mostly tags along for chores and cooking, intermixed with play breaks of course.
• One day a week she goes with us to Bible Study, and then one day a week we do a toddler swap with two other friends from small group that are her age. This has been tagged "fintayabelleday", for Finley, Taylor, and Annabelle Day, who Finley now refers to as "my best fwiends". Each week the girls all get to go to one house for play date, and that mama watches all 3 while the other two mamas get a bit of a break. It has been awesome! Win-win all around.
• She still naps in the afternoons for about 2 hours, but I've had to start waking her by 4pm because now that the girls' share a room, she's not quite ready to fall asleep at their 8pm bedtime. She transitioned surprisingly well to a big girl bed and loves sharing a room with Grayson.

 Her Loves and Strengths:

• Music! Every time we are in the car, she says " turn up peez" or "moosic peez". At home she loves to play music on the CD player in their room, her current favorite being "Honey's Songs", which is a compilation CD from our friend Honey which has quite the mixture of songs! She also loves to play her "tar" (guitar), a hot pink plastic "electric" one that conveniently ran out of batteries. She also beats on things frequently, which I've come to think is part of the whole love of music developing.
• She is compassionate. Almost always if someone looks sad, or gets hurt, or is crying, she is sensitive and says "I sorry". She also talks to baby brother more than anyone else in the family, coming up to my belly and hugging and snuggling it. "He bumpin?" she asks frequently.
• She is very observant. We were driving home the other night in the van and she said "is this our car?". We were puzzled until we realized that a device was in a slightly different place on the dash and it was throwing her off. She also notices my jewelry. "I wike dose earrings mama!" and if I have on anything new, she will notice it.
• She wakes up cheery about 99% of the time.
• She can get herself dressed for the most part now.
• She is speaking in full sentences, even if most of her "r's" and "l's" in words sound like "w's".
• Craft time and drawing are actually not her favorite past times. She colors for about 2 seconds and then says she is done. She does love play doh though.
• She is beginning to to take more of an interest in books and will sit still for longer stories and loves story time at the library.

How She Grows:

• At her 3 year old check up she was about 30-ish pounds, in the 50th percentile for weight and in the 90th percentile for height. Long and lean like her sister.
• She wears mostly 4T clothes, but some 3T things still fit.  

 

Things We are Working On (keeping it real):

• Oh for the love of potty training. This girl has a fairly laid back personality, so she could really just care less about going to the potty. It's not that she won't, she will pee-pee on the potty if we ask her to try and she really has to go, it's just that she doesn't really care if she is wet or stinky. After trying a few different things, we just decided to switch over to pull-ups (mostly because I'm hugely pregnant and she can put those on herself without me bending over to change a diaper, except for stinkys of course), and just be low-key about the whole thing until she shows more interest. Testing my patience for sure!
• We are encouraging her to use words instead of screaming and crying for what she wants.
• Just recently she has started challenging us more on obedience (coming when we say come, cleaning up when we ask her to), but it doesn't take much in the consequence department for her to change her mind and obey. 

 

And sometimes it's important to remember the Little Things...We recently realized that she has started saying "Gwayson" instead of "Gayson". It's the smallest thing but it makes her sound so much older! It's actually quite funny to hear them call each other throughout the house, amazing me that 3 short and 5 short years ago they were just babies. She also started saying "my sista" when she refers to Grayson sometimes to other people.