Max is Three!

Our baby boy turned three years old on February 1. We scheduled his wellness check up on the his birthday so I was able to find out his stats.  Weight is 32lb 6oz (50 - 75%) and height is 37.25" (50 - 75%).  Max is growing well and very healthy.  The pediatrician tried to carry a conversation with him to test out his verbal skills but he had a little stage fright and didn't say much.  At home, we've really noticed a big difference in Max's language skills in the last couple of months.  He's really stringing lots of words together and I'm particularly impressed with his proper use of tenses and pronouns.  Here are some of the things you might hear him say:

me: Max, eat your rice and tofu please
Max: I DID, I already ATE my rice!

Max: I'm tired
Jalen: then go to sleep!
Max: I WILL!

Max (on seeing a picture of Rick on the TV): that's YOU Daddy, that's YOU!

Here are some other things that are memorable about Max at 3 years old:

•  He loves his set of 4 wooden Thomas the Train puzzles.  He will do them over and over again even though it probably takes him less than 5 minutes to complete each one.
• Unfortunately, he doesn't know his numbers and letters that well yet.  We really have to work on this one.  
• Max is obsessed with the Disney/Pixar Cars movies.  He especially loves Mater and loves all of the Mater's Tall Tale shorts.  He can almost recite all of them by heart even though he doesn't understand all of the words.
• He loves to eat oranges.  When he eats navel oranges, he really cleans up all of the flesh.  He also loves to eat strawberries.  Other than that, he's quite a picky eater.  When he likes something he'll eat a lot but otherwise it can be quite a struggle to get him to eat. His all time favorite food is probably french fries.
• Max is 90% potty trained!  He stays dry all day in his underwear.  We still put him in pull-ups at night but he's been dry overnight for at least 1 month.  He doesn't quite tell us when he needs to go pee so we do remind him to but he always tells us when he needs to poop because we let him watch Mater's Tall Tales as a treat afterwards.  I still need to get him to be able to go to the bathroom all by himself (without peeing all over the floor).
• Max is not great at sharing toys.  He and Jalen often fight over the same things and egg each other on.  I often have to separate them and tell Jalen to play in a different room.

This year, I decided not to throw a big birthday party for Max.  We don't have a lot of friends with kids his age so if I had a big party, I'd be more worried about entertaining the older kids than Max.  So instead, I decided to have a birthday outing for him instead.  We took him to the Seattle Children's Museum for the afternoon.  Jalen and Max both had a lot of fun exploring the museum.  I still don't think Max realized that we did that for him, he was just having fun.

Here's Max in the art studio making a heart with clay.  He looks adorable in his little apron!