Anna-3 Years Old!

I'm not going to lie, I'm a little in denial about the fact that my baby girl is three years old. The other night, she was really sleepy before bed and wanted to snuggle on my lap. I was loving it because she's never been too much of a cuddler, but I realized that she barely fits on my lap anymore. I suddenly felt really sad and had to fight not to cry as I hugged her even tighter. She is getting too big too fast!

Anna's birthday was pretty low-key this year. On her birthday, she picked waffles for breakfast, we took her to Chick-fil-A for lunch, and she opened her presents from us and Grandma Karry that evening. Then on Sunday, we had a small party with my siblings and grandparents and had a cake and ice cream. Even though her party was small, she definitely got spoiled with presents. It seriously felt like she opened at least one present every other day in the week between Christmas and her birthday. But I guess that's just what happens when your birthday is only a week after Christmas...and when you have a bunch of grandparents and aunts and uncles who love to spoil you!

Anna can be shy sometimes, but she's usually a chatterbox. I need to be better about writing down the things she says because she cracks us up a lot. A few nights ago, I can't even remember what she was talking about, but she exclaimed, "It was undeliebable!" (unbelievable!) Also, yesterday she exclaimed, "I love ice cream! Ice cream is my life!" Some of my favorite Anna-isms are "speshatels" (vegetables), "my glasses are all froggy (foggy)" and "proberry" (probably). She also calls all hearts "heartbeats" and she says "never mind" and "What you talkin 'bout?" all the time and it's super cute. Anna loves to tell stories and to be silly and make us laugh, which she does daily. Here's her rendition of "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" from a few months ago.

She also still loves to sing.  Here are a couple of my favorite videos of her singing.

And here's her dancing before her bath.

Anna continues to love reading. It's pretty amazing how fast she memorizes books and then "reads" them to herself. We've started letting her read books in her bed at night, which has actually worked really well to keep her in her room haha. Some of her favorite books right now are the Fancy Nancy, Pete the Cat, and the Elephant and Piggie and the Pigeon series by Mo Willems.

Since I started tutoring a boy in our neighborhood, Anna will often ask me to help her with her "homework." So we've done a few little lessons on the alphabet and numbers. She seems to really enjoy it, so I'm going to try to get more structured with it and do a few lessons a week. We'll see how it goes!

Playing school

Anna is very sweet and kind. An perfect example is when Paul had the stomach flu and I had to take him upstairs to clean him up, she followed me up the stairs and asked, "Can I help you, Mom?" Then she went and got Paul a new diaper and his jammies and read him a book while I changed my clothes. Melted my heart! She is very affectionate and gives hugs and kisses and says, "I love you" without prompting. She's a sweetheart.

She's also maturing a lot and doesn't throw tantrums nearly as often as she used to. She also doesn't insist on doing EVERYTHING by herself anymore, thank goodness! I am starting to see the threenager attitude come out though. She is queen of the pouty-lips, and when she doesn't get her way, she'll often fold her arms, stomp her feet, and exclaim, "I'm mad!" It shouldn't be funny, but it really is.

Anna loves to play pretend. We play pretend store, pretend restaurant, pretend beach, pretend library, pretend doctor, you name it.  If we've done it for real, she wants to play it for pretend.  She also likes to act out scenes from her favorite show (Daniel Tiger) and favorite movie (Frozen). She also loves to be "Super Anna" and used to use her blanket as a cape until we got her a "real" super hero cape and mask for her birthday. She often wears it with a "twirly skirt." :)

Super Anna!

With Paul learning to crawl, we've definitely had lots of lessons on patience and sharing. Anna is getting pretty good about sharing with her brother, and it's not uncommon for Anna to want Paul to play with her. But she still has a hard time when he wrecks the games she's playing or pulls her clothes or hair. For awhile there, she was going to time-out at least once a day for pushing Paul. But she's getting better. And for the most part, I'm actually pretty impressed with how well they play together. They really do enjoy each other and have fun being silly and making each other laugh. Which makes me happy. :)

Being sweet with Paul

And not so sweet

She always helps wash Paul's hair. Poor Paul. :)

Anna's a bit of a picky eater. But not in all the usual picky kid ways. She eats the crust of bread and pizza and leaves the middle part. She doesn't like spaghetti or lasagna or really any foods with meat or sauce. She likes most vegetables.  She loves oatmeal. The only really normal kid foods she likes are mac and cheese and quesadillas (a tortilla with cheese on top melted in the microwave), which she requests for lunch at least five days a week. She's a funny kid.

Anna stopped taking naps consistently around October. She's pretty much dropped them entirely now (except when she falls asleep in the car running afternoon errands), but for awhile, she would not take a nap and then fall asleep on the floor or couch. Or eating an apple.

Anna is finally almost potty-trained! She has been using the potty off and on since the summertime; we tried potty-training in September and it didn't go too well, so we waited.  We started up again after New Year's, and she's doing really well. She only had a few accidents in the first week, and now she's really good about telling me when she needs to go. She can hold it for a long time though! In the beginning, I would sit her down on the potty every hour and sometimes it took three or four tries before she would go again. I also had to bribe her to sit on the potty with books, and now she wants me to read to her every time she has to go haha.

Oh, and I can't forget her new glasses! She got new glasses right before Christmas, and they are the grown-up kind with real frames that can break and no strap to hold them on. I was a little nervous that she would take them off all the time and leave them where they can get stepped on. But she's been great with them. For the first few weeks, they kept sliding down her nose, but we took them in to get them adjusted, and now they are perfect. She looks so grown up!

Well, I've been working on this post for over a week, and I could probably go on but I'll just leave it here. Here's a photo dump from the past several months. :)

Her first drawing of a person!

She insisted on wearing her new coat in September

Running on the trail

Anna's Second Eye Surgery

Anna had her first eye muscle surgery in September of 2013 when she was almost 9 months old. Her eyes looked great after the surgery, but started crossing again after about six months.  In July of 2014, she started wearing glasses, and we were also patching one of the lenses every day for 4-5 hours. After doing that for about 9 months, her eyes were not showing any signs of improvement, and we decided to go ahead with another surgery.  I didn't feel near as nervous going into it as I did the first time around.  It helped knowing what to expect.  This surgery was similar to the first one, except this time, they strengthened the outer muscles where last time they weakened the inner ones.

Day before surgery

All ready to go

Anna was completely calm going into surgery.  She is pretty used to doctors and nurses by now so getting her vitals taken and everything didn't even phase her.  After they took her back to surgery, we had to wait about an hour before her doctor came and told us everything went well.  When they brought Anna back to us about a half hour later, she was still really out of it.  She had a rough time waking up.  She was crying and thrashing around, trying to get away from whoever was holding her.  She still had her I.V. in and she got so tangled up from tossing and turning that it ended up pulling out and getting blood all over me, her, and the floor.  That was a little traumatic!  After about twenty minutes, Derek finally got her calmed down with a pack of fruit snacks.  When he tried to feed her one, she immediately snatched it out of his hand and said, "No! I do it myself!"  That's when we knew we had our Anna back. :)

After surgery

I look like I got shot, haha

So far, the surgery seems successful.  For the first month after surgery, she didn't wear her glasses because they were over-correcting her eyes and actually causing them to turn outward slightly.  But now she's wearing them again, and her doctor say her eyes are looking really good.  But there's just no way to know if they'll stay straight.  It's not uncommon for people with strabismus to need multiple eye surgeries. Sometimes a person's eyes will be good for five or ten years and then start crossing again.  It's  just not a perfect fix because the problem is really with the brain's control of the eye muscles and not the eye muscles themselves.

I've been doing quite a bit of research on strabismus and have read some promising research on vision therapy.  We actually met with an optometrist who does vision therapy two years ago before her first surgery.  He thought her eyes were so bad that the therapy wouldn't help and surgery was the only way to fix them.  But he gave us some eye exercises to do at home and said they would help her eyes stay straight after surgery. We were pretty diligent about it for the first couple months after her surgery, but then we didn't keep up with it because we didn't have vision insurance to cover optometrist appointments, and because her eyes were doing so great that we we just got too relaxed about it...and also because her opthamologist told us that vision therapy doesn't actually work in most cases and basically said it was a waste of our time and money.  It's apparently quite a debate in the eye-care world.  Most eye surgeons (like Anna's) say the research shows that it's only successful in very limited, specific cases.  But the optometrists who use vision therapy report very high success rates for kids like her.  I'm not sure what to think.  We really love Anna's opthamologist and think he's a great doctor and a skilled surgeon...but we can't help but wonder if she wouldn't have needed a second surgery if we had kept up with the vision therapy.  Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference.  But we figure that even if it doesn't work, it's worth a shot.  We're willing to try anything to avoid more surgeries!  So we scheduled an appointment for Anna at the end of the month.  At least if we try it and it doesn't work, we'll know we explored all the options.

Anna, Age 2 1/2

If I could use only one word to describe Anna at this age, it would be "independent."  If she can do it by herself (or if she thinks she can do it by herself), she will NOT allow anyone to help her.  She has to put on her shoes, take of her pajamas, climb into her car seat, wash her face, climb into bed---all without assistance.  If you do something for her that she wanted to do herself, a giant tantrum ensues.  And then she has to do it again herself.   Like one night, Derek put her in bed and she immediately started bawling because she wanted to do it herself.  Still crying, she then climbed OUT of bed, put both feet on the floor for one second, and then climbed right back in again.  Luckily, we have figured out how to work her independent streak to our advantage.  If we want her to stop dawdling (she's a queen at dawdling) and do something right away, all we have to say is, "Anna, do you want to do _______ by yourself or should mommy/daddy help you?"  And then we just move like we're going to help her and she immediately says, "No!  I do it myself!" and does it herself.  It (almost) always works like a charm.  There was one time when she took forever to get into her car seat, so I finally just put her in it, and she screamed "I want to do it myself!" the ENTIRE 20-minute car ride home. And once we got home (after sitting in time out until she calmed down) she had to go back out to the car and climb in the car seat by herself before she could move on with life.  I know this is just a stage most kids go through, but it still drives me CRAZY!

Anna continues to adore books.  She can "read" most of her favorites by herself these days.  I'm always amazed how well she can recite the words almost verbatim, especially the ones we bring home from the library and have only read half a dozen times.  She has an incredible memory. She will just be off playing and all of a sudden, I hear her quoting entire picture books to herself.  Her favorite books right now are definitely the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems. (If you've never read them, you need to. They're hilarious...for kids and parents alike).

Anna also still loves to sing. She sings all the time to herself, but also frequently invites you to sing with her.  My favorite is when she sings the hymns in church.  She doesn't know most of the words, so she just sings jibber-jabber.  I'm always reminded of this clip from the Jim Carrey version of "The Grinch"...

Here's a cute video of Anna singing Twinkle Twinkle. She recorded it herself on my phone haha.

She also still loves to dance.  We have to skip all the slow songs that come up on Pandora until we get to what she calls a "dancing song."  :)  Her favorite song to dance to is Uptown Funk haha.  I know we've posted about a million videos of her dancing in front of the T.V., but this one might be my all-time favorite.  It's a little long, but SO hilarious!

We think the rolling on the floor must be her new interpretive dance moves.  No clue where she picked that up!

A big event for Anna was her second eye muscle surgery at the end of May.  Click here to read my entry about that.

Anna still doesn't sleep well consistently.  I'm not kidding when I say Paul is a better sleeper than his sister!  She often doesn't go to sleep until 10:30 and wakes up before 6:30.  She also doesn't like to take naps anymore.  Sometimes, she refuses to take a nap and then does this at dinner...

Anna is the best big sister.  Whenever Paul wakes up from a nap, she is the first one to hear him, and if I don't respond quickly enough, she is at his door calling, "Just a minute Paul!  Mommy's coming! It's ok, Paul!"  Then when I open the door to his room, she immediately climbs up his crib and looks over the rail to say hi to him. :) She always does silly things to make him laugh, brings him toys to play with, puts his binkie in his mouth when he's crying, and fetches his burp cloth when he spits up. She also loves to help change his diaper.  Weird, I know.  If I don't let her have a turn wiping his bum (after he's already clean of course), she will cry.  I tell her that one day, she's going to laugh at herself for crying over NOT getting to change a diaper haha.

"Anna, will you get Paul a toy?" (or ten?)

Making Paul laugh

Anna has never acted resentful or jealous of Paul, but lately, she's started crying  if we're doing something fun with Paul and not her.  One time, I was finishing giving her a bath and she could hear Derek singing a song with Paul, and she started bawling.  I assumed she was jealous that Paul was getting attention instead of her.  But then yesterday, I was playing pat-a-cake with Paul in the living room while she was eating graham crackers at the kitchen table.  She started crying and said, "I want to see my Paul!"  So apparently she isn't sad because Paul's getting attention instead of her but because she wants to see him laugh too.  Funny girl.

Anna loves to make-believe play.  She loves making food in her kitchen and comes up some pretty unique sandwich combinations (pickle, pancake, pineapple sandwich anyone??).  She also likes playing "doctor office" with her doctor kit and listening to all of our heartbeats. Oh, and she's really into pretending to be a puppy.  She crawls around on all fours and asks for a bowl of water on the floor almost every day.

Even doctors need naps haha

Anna has a few favorite toys.  At the moment, her blanket, her dolls, Sally and Rosie, and their two blankets, and her two monkeys, Monkey and Mr. Monkey, have to go with her everywhere.  She sleeps with them at night, then in the morning, she brings all of them downstairs to play.  Then at nap time, they all have to come back up the stairs to her bed before she'll go to sleep.

She wanted to take a picture with her monkeys

Monkey

Mr. Monkey

I think Anna's verbal skills are pretty advanced for her age.  She uses (mostly) full sentences and can say almost all the sounds, although she still struggles a bit with the hard c and "th" at the beginning of words.  But she does still say some words and phrases wrong, and it's super cute.  She pronounces "ketchup" as "chepit."  "Kitchen" is "chicken."  "Slippery" is "slipperly."  Some of my favorite phrases she says are "That's so tasty!" "It's my favorite, favorite!" "I'm so excited!" "Oh my goodness!"and "I fink so." Also, when she's doing something silly and you ask her what she's doing she stops, gives a sheepish grin, and replies, "I dunno."

She has also started saying the things we say to her back to us, which gets pretty hilarious.  For example, I'll be getting dressed or putting my shoes on, and she will cheer, "Good job, Mom!  You did it all by yourself!" Haha. She also frequently gives compliments like, "I like your shirt, Dad!" or "Love your hair, Mom!"  :)

Anna has really loved summertime because she loves being outside.  She helps me water the garden and pick vegetables every morning.  She goes out to jump on our neighbors' trampoline almost every day.  And she LOVES swimming.  We've had a lot of fun going to the splash pad and swimming pool this summer.

If you're still reading this (and not Anna's grandparents), I'm impressed!  Sorry, I can go on forever about my kids haha.

Even though she drives us bonkers sometimes with her little quirks and strong will, we adore our sweet, spunky Anna-girl and wouldn't change her for the world!