On January 24th, my little baby is turning 3 years old. Am I ready for it? Sure, why not? Am I a bit sad? Yes, a little. They do grow up quickly. She's at an adorable age. I especially have enjoyed her 2nd year of life. It's when her personality really started to shine. Her humor became apparent, her communication skills started to soar and her memory just gets better and better everyday. She amazes us all the time. Today it amazed me when she blurted out a 4 syllable word, "Comfortable". She was fluffing up a pillow saying, "I'm going to get comfortable". Where did she learn how to say such a long word? When did her vocabulary start to blossom?
All 3 of our kids have been bilingual since the day they were born so sometimes their vocabulary seemed a bit slower than many of their unilingual peers. I don't remember it ever bothering me. I've always tried not to compare our kids to other kids (or each other). They are all unique in their own way.
Ali loves animals and seems to care a lot about all of ours. She nurtures all her baby dolls and mimics cleaning tasks - especially ironing - like a little mommy. She can easily play by herself, play rough with her big brother or play girlie games with her big sister. She's always had a huge appetite and tries almost all foods. Lately she's been procrastinating at the dinner table and either needs coercing or what we've learned works better is when we ignore her procrastinations and before long she's digging in. She absolutely loves her 'chips' and has been chewing gum for way too long. I remember Terence never had a piece of gum until he was about 5 years old. Ali, on the other hand, has been chewing gum since just before her 2nd birthday. The first few times she may have swallowed it but now she knows better. It may not make some of you feel better, but we only buy sugarfree...
Unlike her big sister, Mia, Ali's been quite fearful of swimming. When she was 1 1/2 (during the summer of 2007) she was a fish and swam solo with arm bands. I'd actually have to fib to other parents and say she was older than 1 year old as arm bands should not be used by kids under 3. We didn't use them as babysitters and never abandoned her but it was amazing to watch her swim at 1 year. Maybe too much time had passed during that winter and she forgot about her joy of water because during her 2nd year of life she feared swimming with or without arm bands and also got upset when water got in her eyes (even in the bath tub). She now gets upset when we wash her hair as she cannot stand water in her eyes. During the last 4 months she has only let Mia wash her hair. Except when Nana and Aunt Lisa were here - she also let them wash her hair.
Just tonight while she laid back to get her hair wet, she discovered floating in the bath. She's always pretended to swim in the bath but tonight she was actually floating on the top of the water without one part of her body touching either the bottom or the side. It was fantastic! She loved the feeling and just lay in the water like a floating angel. I had to take this one photo of her wild hair - which, by the way, has never had a pair of scissors near it!
Ali still says 'me' intead of 'I' like "Me go potty" or "Me want juice". She's slowly starting to change the latter to "May I please..." as she has started saying without a reminder just this weekend to my excitement.
She also loves telling a story and ending with "You remember?" except 'remember' comes out sounding more like 'wah-mem-bah'. I love it. She babbles all the time and half the time I can't pay attention as she is like a wind up toy... It's so funny. She normally makes perfect sense to us but she does mix in a lot of magyar (Hungarian) words. Most recently she's been saying 'Bukfenc' (pronounced 'booh-k-fence') and it's taken me about a month to figure out that this means 'somersault' in Hungarian. She'd often go and stand on her head when she was talking about 'bukfenc' but since she's still not proficient at somersaults it wasn't completely clear to me.
She loves her nursery school and likes being around other kids. She's extremely active and unlike the other two at her age, she cannot sit still for any kid show or movie. The 5 of us just went to see the movie
Tale of Despereaux (in English) at the theater today and Ali just could not sit still. She moves around a lot. At some points she sort of wandered around the theater and danced a little bit even (she always dances whenever there's music). She moved between seats and even sat on Curt's lap for a while then my lap for a while.
She's not a smiley type of kid but she does love to laugh. Like her dad, she laughs the hardest at her own jokes. She has a great, infectious laugh that gets all of us laughing along.
Lately she's started being concerned about her appearance and has asked for a certain shirt or even skirt or dress. Skirts or dresses have never mattered to her much up until our recent trip away to Austria. Mia was sort of having a melt down about wanting to wear a skirt to dinner and so Ali also decided she needed to wear a skirt. I didn't even have a skirt for Ali but convinced Mia to lend her a denim one and we just pulled the elastic tight so she could wear Mia's 6x denim skirt to dinner. She was very happy. She also loves her rainboots and calls them her 'cow boots' as she thinks they are 'cowboy boots' like Mia has.
Every night Ali insists on getting her back and belly rubbed at bed time. Our routine at bedtime (after bath) is to brush teeth, empty the bladders (she's been fully out of nappies for almost 5 months now), read books and then good-nights. If I forget to rub Ali's back or belly, or if Curt does the book reading, Ali tiptoes out of her room and calls down to me, "Mama, you forget to rub my back". So I tell her that I'll be up in a minute and she shouts down "okay!" and pitter patters back into her room waiting patiently for me to arrive. We do the entire procedure of back and belly rubbing and scratching and almost always she's asleep within 5 minutes.
I still cannot believe that it was almost 3 years ago when Curt drove me to the hospital at about midnight. Not knowing if we were having a boy or girl, the anticipation was exciting. Actually, I wasn't thinking about it at all during those horrendous contractions while laying in the warm bathtub but once she arrived I didn't want to know anything but our little baby's gender. They handed her to me in a towel and I just loved her from the minute I saw her. Naturally I had to unwrap the towel and exam everything (first making sure she really was a girl) about her.
We were worried that she would never come as she was 2 weeks late and Dr Csermely, my ob/gyn, wanted to look into taking matters into his own hands. As much as I wanted my pregnancy to be over with, I wanted nature to take it's own course and didn't believe in interfering - especially if she and I were both healthy. So, we waited and we waited and we waited. Every day I received what seemed like hundreds of emails and text messages asking "Did you have the baby yet?" Curt stayed nearby as he was worried he wouldn't make it in time knowing how quickly I went into labor and how far our office was from the hospital.
We didn't expect for me to go into labor at night time as I went into labor in the afternoon with T and in the morning with Mia but they are all different. Our nanny rushed over to look after T and Mia (who were both asleep) while Curt raced me to the hospital. Again, pulling over for each contraction like we had to do in the past. We were so excited to welcome our perfect little girl, Alexandra Patricia Clements on January 24, 2006.
This is actually what I looked like 3 years ago (to the day)!
