Three years of Grace

September 14, 2018

My bright and beautiful girl,

Ready for the "Families Belong
Together" Rally

You are three! Grace, I’m so excited. All my life I have wanted a three-year-old daughter. I don’t know why, that just always seemed like my jam. I’m so glad to have YOU as my three-year-old girl!

You are kind, funny, friendly, observant, creative, smart, enthusiastic, affectionate, and loving. You are also assertive and commanding, very sure of how things should be, and good at instructing people as to how to fulfill your vision. While you used to not be very affectionate, now you climb up into bed with me in the morning, snuggle down next to me, and kiss me on my face, my arm, wherever strikes you. Sweetly, you are also affectionate with trees – we walk home from daycare and you hug and kiss the trees along the way, which warms your NorCal Mama’s heart. You adore your brother and love to play with him, especially when it means telling him what he should be doing. (He’s so kind and adoring, he usually follows instructions willingly!) He wants so badly to do everything big sister is doing, and you do your best to help him do just that. Recently, you discovered jumping from the coffee table onto the couch, and when he couldn’t do it, you held his hand and showed him how, then called us in to watch what

Isaac can do. Maybe it wasn’t our best parenting choice to encourage this activity, but we so loved seeing how you helped Isaac, and how delighted he was about it.

You wave to strangers and say, “Hello!” Everyone is your friend. Before you’ve even met someone, you say, “There’s my friend! Can I go say hello to my friend?” You don’t know a stranger!

You speak in full sentences. We ask you how preschool was today and you say, “I had a pretty good day at preschool.” I love that. You just started at preschool and it really suits you. Your favorite things are the slide, and the new friends. We asked you what you would be learning at preschool this year, and you said, “My ABCDs.” And so you shall!

Exploring how the wind makes
the pinwheel move

You love school, and you also love church. Often, we pretend we are driving, and when I ask you where we are going, you say, “We’re going to church.” You have a love affair with Jesus, who is alternately in your belly, and in your heart. Your preschool is located at a church, and the first day we went you saw that there was a cross on the outside wall. You gasped. “There’s a cross on my preschool! It’s a church preschool!” I told you that the cross was a reminder that Jesus was with you at school, and you said, “Yes, Jesus is in my heart, and mommy and daddy and Isaac is in my heart, too.”

You love to sing songs! Lately you are really into Frozen and Moana, and so you often sing songs from those movies (and you especially love wearing the pink shiny cape and crown Dede made you when you play Elsa!). But you also love nursery rhyme songs, and church songs. You are singing all the time, and to my delight, you love to change the lyrics of songs to suit the situation, or just make up a song to express your desire (“I want a twist. I want a twist. I want I want I want a twist.”). You always seem quite pleased with yourself when you do this – as you should be! It shows a lot of creativity and a mastery of language, and I am SO proud of you. (A favorite adaptation recently was to the tune of 10 Little Indians, but you sang, “One little two little three little underwears…” as you were pulling your underwear on after going potty.)

First day of preschool

You are a wonderful mommy. You take such good care of your babies, comforting them when they cry, feeding them, pushing them around in their little stroller. One night, when we were sharing highs and lows and saying prayers, you said your low was that baby had cried a lot that day, and you prayed that baby wouldn’t cry so much tomorrow. You are so dear.

At age 3, you also struggle with some things. You desperately want to do things yourself, and often you can, but sometimes you can’t and we intervene and this is very frustrating for you. You don’t like when you don’t get to make the rules, and have gotten pretty ornery about that, especially at bedtime. You have so many emotions going on in your little heart, but can’t always make sense of them – that’s okay, adults struggle with this, too. We do our best to help you name those emotions, and to your credit, you are pretty good at it. I hope this serves you as you continue to grow into yourself. You’ve had a lot of change in your life recently, and you are trying to make sense of all that. These are Big Life Lessons, my sweet, and you are doing such a good job of trying to learn from them.

Walking with Baby Lisa

Just for posterity’s sake, here are some of your favorites, at age 3:

Color: pink and purple

Print/design: flowers, hearts

Movies: Frozen, Moana

Food: peanut butter and jelly, Cheerios and milk

Songs: Amazing Grace, Blackbird, Wheels on the Bus, Twinkle Twinkle, Take Me to the Water

Activities: Playground, swimming, playing in sand

Things to wear: dresses that spin around, blue shoes (with star cut-outs)

Hair: in two French braids, or an Elsa braid

Best friends: Isaac, Grace Elaine, Isla, cousin Laika

I love you and admire you more each day, my love. I’m so glad I get a front row seat to your budding self!

                                                                                    Love,

                                                                                    Mommy