As of today, Liam is 34 months old. In two short months he will be three years old. WOW! He's having a Thomas the Train party because the little dude is still obsessed with those trains.
Some words I would use to describe Liam at this stage are:
Smart
Stubborn
Charming
Particular
Entertaining
Smart: We definitely have a little smarty on our hands. He learned the alphabet (both upper and lowercase) many months ago. He's been counting to 20 for many months as well although he still usually skips 15. These days, we get asked 100 times a day what a word starts with or how a word is spelled. He usually already knows the answer for what a word starts with. He knows the letter sounds already. He can spell his name (good thing it's short), knows his full name, and recognize some words by sight. If, for example, you tell him a word starts with G, he will say, "Just like____(another word that starts with G)." So letters and words are his big thing right now for sure. I think he will be an early reader.
Liam got his first non-peg puzzle around Christmas. It was a 24-piece Thomas the Train puzzle. He put it right together in 10 minutes. Since then, he's put together lots of puzzles, with the biggest ones being 35-piece puzzles. If we weren't so tired of picking up tons of puzzle pieces off the floor, we'd let him move on to bigger ones!
He recently started learning the months of the year. He can tell you what months all four of us were born in and recognizes many of the month names by sight. His memory is too good. If you tell him you might do something tomorrow, he will ask you about it right when he wakes up the next day. He always speaks in sentences now. It's not always perfect, but you always know what he's saying. He's starting to pick up phrases he hears and use them, even if not correctly all the time. He loves to say, "Guess what?" but he really doesn't have any follow up to it! He also likes to say, "That's fine." He really says a lot of funny (to us) things these days and I usually don't write them down. I did write down a few in the fall, though:
October 23: Mama: Liam, Where are we going? Liam: To the bakery. For pancakes! For a party!
(Said while sitting in the driver's seat of the car while it was in the driveway.)
October 24: Excuse me. Paper please.
October 25: (Knock on the door.) It's Gibson!
October 29: I'm a dinosaur! I'm a kangaroo!
November 8: He left a toy car named Boomer in the yard. As we were going inside, he said. "Bye bye Goomer. See ya later!"
November 11: Laying his head on my belly: Hi Gibson! You in there?
November 12: I asked Liam who he wanted to pray for: "Jingle Bells...and animals."
November 26: I told him we need to clean his room. He punched the air and said, "Let's Do it!"
November/December: "Don't scares him!" when he doesn't want you to mess with something like a toy
Some of these now seem like no big deal, but at the time I obviously thought they were significant enough to write down. I will try to do better at writing them down from now on.
Stubborn: Goodness, he really is stubborn. If it's not his idea or something he wants to do, he will not do it...at least not without kicking and a good amount of screaming. Especially since Gibson has been born, Liam has become a screamer when he gets told "No" or doesn't get his way about something. He's really good at making his displeasure known.
Charming: This is usually the case around people other than us! Thankfully, Liam keeps his screaming limited to us and is typically nice and friendly to other people. Most of the kids he hangs out with just happen to be girls, and he loves to spend time with them. He talks about them and asks to see them. If you ask him who his friends are, he rattles off the names of several girls. It's cute. However, last week we saw our 8 year old neighbor while out on a walk. Liam has played with her and her sister a few times. They think of him as a cute baby! Anyway, he walked right up to her and said, "Can I have a kiss?" I was kind of dismayed, but we all just laughed. We've never told him to do that or that it's ok to do that. I've asked him for kisses before, but I'm his mother! I guess it's cute now, but it won't be in a couple of years! He only got a handshake, by the way.
Particular: Liam always has an idea of how he wants things to be or how it wants things to be done. He wants a specific snack or a specific toy, and there might be screaming if what he wants isn't available or won't be given to him for whatever reason. He doesn't have OCD tendencies at all. He's definitely not neat; messes are his true forte. I called it particular, but it really leans more toward bossiness. He's quick to tell us where we can sit on the couch or not to mess with his toys. He's a man who knows what he wants, for sure. I can see him bossing around Gibson one day, unfortunately. This is how he is at home, but I'm not sure if he's this way around other kids at church. I've never been told he was bossing kids around, but that doesn't mean he's not doing it!
Entertaining: Having a conversation with him is entertaining because you just never know what he's going to say. We get a lot of laughs out of phrases he says or words he makes up. His imagination is huge, and I like to watch him play with his trains making up stories for them. He loves to pretend and gets so excited about things like parties that will happen in the future. This year, he's aware he has a birthday coming and he finally knows what that means and that there will be a party. It's entertaining to watch him figure stuff out and learn about new things. He "loves" everything, or so he says. He's got a lot of energy and uses it to either be entertaining or annoying, ha! He's very loud, or at least I just noticed how loud he was since we've had a newborn in the house! Liam is always worth watching, if not for the entertainment factor, then for the "We might have to stop him from doing something crazy" factor. To say he keeps us on our toes would be an understatement.
These days, Liam is adjusting to life as a big brother. It has been hard on him. He can't really be trusted around Gibson yet because he would get pretty rough with him. Telling Liam the word "no" just makes him want to do something even more...and he will try to do it fast if he's thinks you're about to stop him. He's been a challenge the past 7 weeks. On more than one occasion, he has said that he wants to throw Gibson away in the trash can. I don't think he really means it, but no longer being the center of attention is hard on a two year old. He frustrates me on a daily basis and has gotten to be fairly disobedient sometimes. It's hard! Liam is obviously still very much loved by us, but I can't give him the massive amounts of attention he wants and needs since Gibson has decided he needs to be attached to me 24/7. We are learning how to be a family of four together!
Some pictures of Liam from the past few months:
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