3 1/2 Years Old

Last week Grant "turned" 3 1/2. I like to do half year updates and use it as an excuse to take pictures - which, by the way, is getting increasingly harder to do with this guy.

• 41 3/4" tall (grown almost 2 inches since his 3 year check-up)
• I didn't weigh him but he's still a string bean!
• Wearing mostly 4T size clothes, especially pants. 3T is just way too short on those long, skinny legs!
• Shoe are 10.5! Little kid shoes now, no more toddler shoes.

"Are we gonna take more than five pictures??"

• Learning letters & numbers. He can identify quite a few of each. We do flash cards together and also like to use board games for number recognition.
• Learning to write! When his drawing became more specific and he was curious about what words look like (asking me to write Mama or Daddy, etc) I decided it was time for some work books. And he practices on his leap pad. So far for words he recognizes his own name, Mama, and Daddy.

• New favorite food: tacos. Sometimes for a break, I'll do a "taco night" at home because all I really have to cook is the meat. Grant finds something so fun about a taco buffet laid out on the dinner table and gets so excited about making his own tacos. Sometimes he'll sit in his seat at the table and just wait while I cook. One night while tucking him into bed he turned to me and said "I love tacos!"
• Favorite things to watch: still loves Cars but found a serious love of all things Toy Story. Also really loving Transformers. Still a big Avengers fan too. Disney is pretty much all we watch for cartoons since they have Jake, Chugginton, Octonauts, Sophia, and Doc McStuffins (and one Disney channel has Avengers). We find Transformers stuff on The Hub.
• Big fan of board games and puzzles!

• Very into sports. Hockey is his obvious favorite but we haven't had great weather for going outside to play baseball. Grant loves to pretend he's Jordan Staal when he's playing in the living room and has us "announce" his goals on a toy microphone like they do at the hockey games ("Carolina Hurricanes goal scored by number 11, JORDAN STAAAAAAAAAAAAL" -  he loves it). Now that the weather looks like it may stay nice, we're going to make more use of his new bike too.
• Loves to pretend. We dress up (yes, we) in his Avengers stuff to fight bad guys. His toys do bad things and he puts them in time out. There are team treasure hunts to find doubloons or some such pirate treasure. Frequent plane or car crashes in our living room (which are leaving marks in my coffee table). All kinds of stuff. And I love to hear some of the outrageous stories he comes up with.

It's hard to believe 6 months have gone by since Grant turned 3. Its so fun to watch him grow into his own little person...even if that person no longer wants to sit still for longer than 5 seconds for pictures. We've got some fun stuff coming up that I'm so looking forward to. We're planning another day at Three Bears Acres (thanks to a groupon deal). Monster Jam is coming back to Raleigh the weekend before my brother-in-law gets married. Thomas the Train is going to be at Tweetsie Railroad in June so we're really hoping to get to that too. It's going to be a busy but fun spring and start of summer. I'm hoping we get to throw in some picnics and trips to the beach too :)