three!

On Saturday my silly girl turned THREE years old. It's insanity. There is no way she is this old!!

She has been over-the-top excited about her birthday since roughly last October, so we knew we had to do it up right this year. We had her first real birthday party, lots of presents and balloons and junk food, and she was the center of attention all weekend- all of her favorite things!

I want to jot down a few updated stats and milestones, but I believe my days of answering all of the same 'monthly update' questions that I've done since her first month update are done. She's just outgrown too many of those categories. BUT it's not a time to be sad- it's time to be JAZZED, because this means she is old enough to answer her OWN questions about herself...I've only been waiting for this moment for like FIFTY BILLION YEARS!!!

But first, the nitty gritty.

Nicknames: Well, I can't quit this one yet. I just love seeing how her nicknames morph over the years!! She is called Millie almost all of the time. I don't know anyone that consistently calls her Camilla. Some of her teachers/school friends (and me) call her Mimi or Mimmy. Matt and I and the rest of my family (her cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles) tend to call her Mill-Mill. And Matt and I still call her Millsie and Nuggie. She calls herself Millie, and she knows her first and last name almost all of the time, and can come up with 'Camilla' maybe half the time that you ask her "but what is your other name? your long name?" Haha.

Stats: She weighs 34 lb 12 oz (84 percentile) and is 37.5 inches tall (60 percentile). She wears 3T clothes, though I'm buying 4T pants for the winter, since even last spring her 3T pants were getting too short. She wears a size 7 shoe. 

Big Girl Skills: She is completely potty trained. No more pull-ups at night, even! She's Team Undies all the time, and even made it through our long drives to/from Florida last month with no accidents in the car (and we didn't have to make a bunch of extra potty stops, either!). Like many things (see: sleeping, eating, generally being an awesome baby and toddler) with Millie, she just sorta figured it out on her own with a little help from mama & daddy. 

She is still successfully sleeping in her Big Girl Bed and that transition has been much easier than I'd feared! Although she does occasionally decide to bop on into our room if she wakes up in the middle of the night, we can usually get her back to her own bed and asleep pretty painlessly. Also, we have learned that she can be successfully bribed to stay in her room until her green light (OK to Wake clock) comes on. So we do that a lot, too...let's be honest. (Most effective bribe is letting her use the iPad in the car on the way to school. This is worth it on so many levels because a) she stays in her room all night, and b) if she has the iPad, I can listen to NPR and not "Elsa song" 3,000 times during our drive to daycare in the morning...)

She knows the words to many songs and can retell her favorite stories. I love when I see her using dolls and stuffed animals to act out stories- her most favorite story to reenact with dolls right now is the Three Billy Goats Gruff. She is ALL ABOUT that mean ol' troll and the big billy goat that "pokes you and kicks you right off this bridge!!" We spend a lot of time making bridges for her zoo animals (trolls) to hide under to scare off the Polly Pockets walking over the bridge. It's so much fun!!

Although she is very interested in letters and sounds and "what dis letter say, Mommy?", she doesn't seem to reliably identify any letters yet. I'm not worried or pushing it, but I just wanted to record that so that in the future I can remember when she did/didn't learn her letters!

She can count very well- rote counting to 15 or so pretty accurately, and she can count with one-to-one correspondence and quantify up to about 6 or so before she starts getting off track.

She loves to draw and paint but does not yet make art that actually resembles anything- her "people" do not have any sort of discernible heads/bodies, etc. However, I think it's interesting that when she is "writing," her "letters" do look markedly different than her "pictures" (lots of quotation marks)...they definitely aren't letters, but they are smaller, more letter-like forms of scribble-scrabble. I think it is all precious and so much fun to watch these skills develop!

Likes/Dislikes: Well...let's just ask the girl herself, okay?? (Disclaimer: I completely disagree with like half of these answers (as in, that is NOT her favorite color/food/thing/whatever), but...whatever.)

 

For the record, I would like to correct her answers and note that NORMALLY and in REAL LIFE, her favorite color is purple, her favorite food is probably rice and beans (at a Mexican restaurant), her favorite snack is "gummies" (fruit snacks), I didn't know she had such strong feelings about applesauce (although she was eating some while I surveyed her, haha), and also she found this whole questionnaire to be very challenging "Whew, Mommy! Dis hard!". (All the crying laughing emoji)

I don't think she has any concept of "when I grow up," and I had thought about explaining what that means, but I loved her answer so much that I decided to just leave it. :)

THIS GIRL.

It's just impossible to describe how incredibly thankful I am to be her mommy.

I see these pictures coming up in my TimeHop now, and there are just so many emotions that come over me:

I remember how overjoyed we were. How terrified. How excited and how anxious. How even as we held her, we didn't know if we would still be holding her an hour or a day or a month later. We were thrilled, but we had to be guarded. We fell in love with her, but we feared what could come.

That strange mixture of joy and terror and delight and nerves and anxiety...I can still taste it in my mouth when I see these pictures. I remember what my stomach felt like. I doubt I'll ever really forget. 

But now it's three years later. She's an average (though obviously funnier, cuter, and more adorable than average) toddler, we're just regular parents chasing our kid down the aisle at Target and engaging in iPad-related negotiations, and at a glance, you'd never know there was anything unusual about how our family came to be. 

I know I say this almost every time I write, but I can't bring myself to stop. She is so, so worth every minute of waiting, every year of struggle, every breath of fear, every sleepless night. She is the answer to my every prayer and a greater gift than I could have hoped for.

Happy birthday to my sweet, strong, brave girl. Being your mommy is my greatest privilege. 

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