James-y is three!

This was the year of James' "magic" birthday...when he would turn three on the third. He's the first of the kids to have his magic birthday, so I was interested in setting up some sort of tradition. Something a 7-year-old boy and a 14-year-old-girl and a 28-year-old man could all enjoy on their magic birthdays in the future.

I finally settled on three wishes.

James' three wishes for his magic birthday were:

1. Lots of little kids running around.
2. A game where we throw candy at each other and then eat it.
3. um, um, uhhhhhhhhhhhh

I filled in the third wish with a surprise trip to our local gymnastics training center for Open Gym. The kids ran and jumped and balanced on all the equipment for an hour. It's one of their favorite places to go.

He also got to choose his birthday dinner and a cake (hot dogs and a strawberry cake with a rainbow on top, respectively).

The party with lots of little kids running around was easy. He insisted on NO big kids. I named every single kid his age that he could possibly be talking about and he settled on three girls: his cousin Sara and two girls from his church Nursery class. It was a free form play date with singing and cake:

Then right before the girls had to go home, we played a candy throwing game. Each kid threw a few pieces of candy at the backs of the other kids and got to keep the pieces that hit someone. For some reason, they all aimed at me. Every piece. And they were pretty good shots.

At James' 3-year checkup, the doctor declared him perfectly healthy except for some fluid in his eardrums that hasn't drained since his ear infection 6 weeks ago. The doc wants to see James in a couple months to check again. If there's still fluid, then James will be referred to a specialist for hearing tests and consultation. James was the slowest of our kids to speak, and the clarity of his speech lags significantly behind his peers at church, but he's recently cleared up some phoneme substitutions and refined his grammar a bit, so I'm not too terribly concerned about hearing problems.

He's still large (90th percentile for height and weight). He's still shy around adults. He's still a curious and confident kid who doesn't mind wandering off alone to follow an interesting idea. He really wants to go fishing and cut up a fish and eat it all gone. He remembers promises and holds you to them. He loves candy. And just in the last couple of weeks he's started playing with friends...one-on-one cooperative play lasting longer than a couple minutes with kids he knows well. We often wait outside with a few other parents while the kids line up waiting for the school day to begin. One morning, James left my side to go stand next to a 2-year-old and smile at him. They ended up chasing each other around a tree trunk.

I took James to meet the new preschool teacher this week. He was shy around her, but managed to answer a few of her questions anyway. James is SO excited to go to preschool. I was telling him everything I could think of about it and he sort of latched on to the idea of getting notes with candy inside them (Valentine's Day). I have conflicting feelings about sending him to preschool a semester early, but meeting the teacher and seeing James bounce off the walls with giddy excitement in that room has tipped the scales in favor of it.

During our visit, unfortunately, Matthew tripped and smacked his face on the doll house. He has an impressive black eye now :(

I love this little James (though he insists that he's BIG, BIG, BIG). That grin of his just gets me every time. I love being his favorite person. I love time with him while the older kids are at school. He's a totally different guy one-on-one. Sweet boy. So glad he's mine, er, uh, ours.