The first quarter of Sonia’s third year was full of more amazing leaps, including the huge milestone of potty training, and gaining a grasp on the use of pronouns.
Shortly after her second birthday, the toddler OCD streak I had heard about started to show through in Sonia. Some of her favorite activities became laying coasters out on the table, and having herself and her stuffed friends pretend to sleep. Interestingly enough, for all the play sleeping on pillows, she won’t allow us to put one in the crib with her when she sleeps.
In general, she started interacting more with her stuffed friends, especially Ribbit, and the clarity of her speech improved noticeably. Other developments included some actual melody starting to come into her songs and words, and starting to draw shapes, and color closer to the lines. She also learned to interact with the phone and started to pretend to call Grannie to ask for more wipies (I assume she picked this up at school), and even took her first selfie (accidentally of course). For now, we don’t let her use the phone, though.
Some fun activities to start her third year included another trip to the Kidspace museum, the Natural History Museum, and the fun and sugar rush of several friends’ birthday parties!
We also took a weekend morning to go to the zoo, which elicited a “Sonia so excited!” comment or two.
After the first month of this period, we were starting to be concerned that we were in for a rough “terrible twos.” Lots and lots of crying for very small reasons, and comments like a tearful “Sonia say yes” whenever we would say no to something. However, likely due to her advanced verbal skills, we were able to talk her through a lot of it, and mid-way through the quarter she started to be able to gain some control over her emotions. Some of the things we talked about were how to “ask nicely,” and that we couldn’t understand her when she was crying or whining. We also talked about taking deep breaths, and gave her choices whenever possible. This is not to say that she doesn’t still cry at the drop of a hat, but at least she can work herself out of it most of the time. We still feel like we are saying ‘no’ an awful lot, and not feeling excited to be around our whiny toddler sometimes, but I guess that is just part of parenting during this boundary-testing phase.
The big step that occurred mid-way through the quarter was potty training. We’d been talking about the toilet, and she’d even been using it once in awhile for almost 6 months. By around 26 months, though, she was often running to the potty herself when she had to pee. After coming home from school with an awful rash one Friday, we decided it was time to ditch the diapers. We went and bought her some undies Saturday morning, and amazingly she had zero accidents all weekend long! When she went back to school on Monday, she had three accidents in the span of 2 hours, so the teacher put her back in diapers and then sent her home with a note about their policy of no diapers once potty training had started – annoying. After a talk with her that evening about having to go up to the teacher and tell them when she had to go so they could help her to the toilet, she went accident free the rest of the week, and really has had only a handful of accidents since! She even figured out on her own she wasn’t supposed to pee during sleep either, even though we had decided we weren’t going to push that part yet since she was still in a crib. Within a week, though, she was waking up dry from naps, and crying for us in the middle of the night to help her to the toilet, so we followed her lead and started putting her in undies, and she has not had a single night-time accident! About a month into it, she’s even starting to be able to pull her own pants down and hold it all night without having to wake us up, yippee! What was even better about the whole thing was that there were no rewards or punishments necessary other than teaching her that it was good and she should feel proud of herself for going on the big toilet. We are so proud of our little ‘big girl!’
To go along with her big girl toilet training, and because both she and Dalton were growing out of their respective seats at the table, we got Sonia a booster seat and moved Dalton up to her seat. We were surprised how quickly she took to it, and that she didn’t mind that Dalton had taken what once was hers. Being potty trained also meant she could wear a big girl swim suit when it got warm enough to remind her how much she loves playing in the water.
As the quarter wrapped up, we noticed that our little girl is indeed growing up, and out. She now no longer fits in her 2T clothes either in length or width. The other thing that is growing is her hair! That mop of curls is in a difficult stage where it is long enough to make her wake up looking like a mad scientist, but too short to get all up. Thankfully, she doesn’t seem to mind.
Also toward the end of the quarter Sonia got to move up to Ms Tammy’s 2-year old class at school and out of the toddler room. She really seems to love Ms Tammy, and going to school in general. Especially now that it’s ‘summer camp’ time at school, and they have water play days every Monday and a different enrichment ‘on-site fieldtrip’ every Wednesday, including a petting zoo, tide pool and cowboy show. In the older classroom now, she no longer seems to be the most advanced one there, too which we expect should be good for her.
The last notable thing of this period has been her finally getting a grasp on the correct usage of I and you, instead of speaking in the third person. She just continues to amaze us every day, can’t wait to see what the next three months will bring.