We have a three-year-old in the house again! (Yes, that's an exclamation point, but it's terror as much as excitement. Three is so much fun and so much pain all at the same time.)
Toby doesn't just read books; he lives them. He's a robot with an automated voice. He's Mary Poppins. He's a charging unicorn and a snorting boar ("and what a beast I am!"). He's Frog and Toad and Mary (Jesus' mother) and Little Blue Truck and, more often than anything else, a monster (three-eyed when possible). When Levi turned three, I was still worried that he didn't have any imagination at all (I was dead wrong; it just took a while to surface past his literal self). Toby's whole life is one big imaginative play, and thanks to his incredible verbal skills, we hear every line.
He's also 100% more independent than any of his big brothers. He's the kid who exits his room after not sleeping through nap time with his pants in one hand and his diaper in the other (yes, we tried potty training; no, he wasn't ready). He's been known to look straight at dinner guests in our house and tell them to go away. (Don't worry, we don't encourage rudeness, but it's hard not to laugh at his indignant little self.) He's that kid shrieking in the back of the sanctuary, "Put. Me. DOWN, Grandma!"
He's inquisitive ("Is that math, Levi? Can I do math?") and demanding ("You WILL read this book to me right this instant!") and suddenly very sweet ("You have to stay with me or I'll get lonely.") and so, so silly. He loves to dress up, to draw (mostly monsters), to watch TV (never mind that Levi had only barely watched a few episodes before he turned three), to kiss the top of Calvin's head.
We were not short on personality in this house before Toby, but we have exponentially more with him in our lives. I can't wait to see what God does with this fierce little boy!
Our family tradition: the birthday boy goes to pick out donuts with Daddy.
We started the day the way we do all birthdays: donuts and presents. Randomly, it also included a discussion of Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates via speakerphone between Levi and my mom, and live footage of two astronauts doing extravehicular activity on the international space station. Now there's a little peek into life in our house.
Blowing out his candle, tucked into a banana cream donut covered in powdered sugar with a dollop of strawberry jam. I should have taken an "after" picture of the mess.
Donut remains, scattered birthday cards, NASA on the laptop . . .
While we have plenty of toys here, we discovered about a month ago that we don't have any little people or animals. Nobody has ever been drawn to them before, I suppose, but when I set out a little nativity scene that the boys were allowed to play with, Toby was immediately and consistently engaged. Isaac wanted realistic looking animals and I needed to bump up a Rainbow Resource order to get free shipping, so we browsed the options and settled on a black wolf, an American badger (necessary for acting out Jan Brett books), a bull moose (necessary because we live in MN now), and a bison (because bison are cool).
Whoa. A bison. (Three times in the next hour, he would coming running up to me and ask, "what is this animal called?")
He wasted no time in introducing the animals to each other.
Right away, Toby passed out an animal to each of his brothers and they got down to some serious play. We suspect that he doesn't realize that they're all his; poor fourth child is so unaccustomed to having anything of his very own! For a while this morning, three of them had names: Mary Poppins (the bison), Jane (the wolf), and Jacob (the badger). (Yes, Jane's brother is Michael, not Jacob. Levi was playing his own parallel story at the time.) But by bedtime tonight the names seem to have been forgotten, which is fine. I'm not sure the sturdy bison or the teeth-baring wolf would have appreciated their feminine names.
One of Toby's many obsessions right now is three-eyed monsters (it's a long story), so I made that my cake goal. Super-super-simple (baked in a Pampered Chef batter bowl), and I only made half of a cake recipe so that we're not eating the leftovers for days. I had some heavy whipping cream in the fridge, leftover from holiday cooking (which I intend to blog about sometime soon), so I tried a whipped cream frosting. Suffice it to say, I won't be doing that again. Whole wheat cake needs a good thick buttercream. But Toby didn't care -- in fact, he didn't eat his cake at all, just the ice cream. Maybe next year I won't even bother. (Except I will, because I'll feel bad if I don't.)
He wanted dinner at a place with a play area. Chick-fil-A it is!
Three-eyed monster cake with butterscotch eyes.
Toby doesn't just read books; he lives them. He's a robot with an automated voice. He's Mary Poppins. He's a charging unicorn and a snorting boar ("and what a beast I am!"). He's Frog and Toad and Mary (Jesus' mother) and Little Blue Truck and, more often than anything else, a monster (three-eyed when possible). When Levi turned three, I was still worried that he didn't have any imagination at all (I was dead wrong; it just took a while to surface past his literal self). Toby's whole life is one big imaginative play, and thanks to his incredible verbal skills, we hear every line.
He's also 100% more independent than any of his big brothers. He's the kid who exits his room after not sleeping through nap time with his pants in one hand and his diaper in the other (yes, we tried potty training; no, he wasn't ready). He's been known to look straight at dinner guests in our house and tell them to go away. (Don't worry, we don't encourage rudeness, but it's hard not to laugh at his indignant little self.) He's that kid shrieking in the back of the sanctuary, "Put. Me. DOWN, Grandma!"
He's inquisitive ("Is that math, Levi? Can I do math?") and demanding ("You WILL read this book to me right this instant!") and suddenly very sweet ("You have to stay with me or I'll get lonely.") and so, so silly. He loves to dress up, to draw (mostly monsters), to watch TV (never mind that Levi had only barely watched a few episodes before he turned three), to kiss the top of Calvin's head.
We were not short on personality in this house before Toby, but we have exponentially more with him in our lives. I can't wait to see what God does with this fierce little boy!
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