Happy 3rd Birthday to Soren!

My little guy is three. Soren still has the sweetness of a baby, but the budding, stubborn independence so typical for kids his age.  Shrieks of "I do it!" are heard more often at our house and a simple task like throwing a used diaper in the trash can turn into hysterics if he wants to do it and isn't allowed to.  I've always said he's my easy-going child, but I think three is going to be the year he challenges that!

Just like Oliver did at this age, Soren is starting that slow, frustrating process towards dropping naps all together.  Whether he naps at all and for how long have been hit or miss, but at least we have noticed a pattern.  If there's else going on during nap time, he'd rather be doing that instead of napping.  Therefore, he usually naps the afternoons Oliver has preschool.  But again, this is a slow process, so the lack of sleep eventually catches up with him and he wants to nap no matter what else is going on.  Whether he naps or not, he has difficulty falling asleep at night, which has been challenging on Chris and me who look forward to our peace and quiet once the kids have gone to bed!

What Soren shows no progress towards is potty-training.  He seemed very interested in it months ago and even insisted on going to daycare with no diapers a couple of times.  We've never even used a potty chair with him and instead managed to get him used to sitting on the toilet.  Although he knows how to use the toilet, it's clear he hasn't learned to recognize when he has to go.  So we stepped back from toilet-training and are letting Soren more self-awareness before giving it another try.  

Soren loves preschool.  Thank goodness, because he always wanted to hang out in Oliver's classroom at drop-off and was so proud when he got his first book bag, but with all the transitions the last year, I wasn't sure he was going to change his mind about this whole preschool thing.  Drop-offs were a little rough the first few weeks, but nothing out of the ordinary for a barely-three-year-old.  He only has four other kids in his class and typical for his age, he names his teacher as his favorite friend at school.

It's strange to have a blond child, well dirty-blond really, but given no one in my family has anything close to blond hair, his looks very blond to me.  And friends have commented that his hair looks blonder, although I'm attributing that to a summer spent in the sun.  Before anyone starts making jokes about mailmen, Chris had blond hair as a kid, even though it's now as brown as mine.

Soren's pronunciation has been slow and coming.  He especially has trouble saying the "s" sound.  But just in the last week or two we noticed that he's starting to pronounce his name correctly, and not "Oren."  He hasn't 100% mastered the "s" sound, so if I hear him stumble on a word, I try to see if I can get him to repeat it correctly.  One day he asked for a spoon and after a couple rounds of me trying to get him to say it correctly and him responding with "poon," he finally matter-of-factually said, "I want one of those."  Way to adapt. 

Soren's fear of dogs is still pretty intense, but we're starting to see him  open up to them.  He still flips out most of the time (and I mean utterly and completely lose it), but if he has an opportunity to warm up to the idea, (that is the dog doesn't approach him, look at him, surprise him with its presence, and so on) he might actually reach out his little hand for a quick pet.  Unfortunately I forgot to mention Soren's fear of dogs to our au pair, but he quickly figured it out when he took the kids to their first playdate and the family had a dog, the most docile, lethargic Lab one has probably ever met.  When I asked Soren what they did with the dog when he was scared, he said in a timid little voice, "The doggie had to go to his woom."

After the party the week before his birthday, Soren's actual birthday was quite low-key.  We spent the morning at the park with friends and he got Izzy's ice cream for dessert that evening.  He was also quite excited to open his birthday presents to find a Mickey Mouse movie and Heatwave, the transformer.