Our big girl is 3 years old!!

Our sweet, sassy, kind, loving big girl is three years old!! The morning of her birthday I told her, Clara do you know that on this day 3 years ago mommy was in the hospital? With great distress in her voice, "oh no mommy, what happened?" Mommy went to the hospital so you could be born!  "Yeah, I use to be in your tummy, but that was when I was a baby." This kid never ceases to make me laugh!! She has an appetite for life and we absolutely cannot get enough of her charisma, excitement, and enthusiasm.

At Clara's three year appointment she aced the three year old developmental assessment and is still our tall girl (definitely getting that from her daddy) at 38 inches (70%). She weighs in at 28 pounds (8%) which is only a few pounds more than her one year old brother and the reason we have to take in the waist of all her pants and shorts (fortunately she has an aunt that is also a fabulous seamstress). She isn't a huge fan of eating unless it's sweets and since we don't give her those very often she frequently chooses just not to eat (I'm not sure who she got that gene from because it definitely isn't from me or Brian).

At three years old Clara knows all her ABCs and can identify both the capital and lower case. She can write her name and knows her numbers 1-10 by identifying the actual number and by counting objects. We are currently working on the sounds each letter makes which she is doing great with and numbers 10-20 which isn't going as great but we'll get there. Clara's vocabulary is massive and she amazes me every day with the things she says and understands.

We started celebrating Clara's birthday on her actual birthday which was a Monday. Sunday night Brian and I blew up a bunch of balloons and early Monday morning we snuck in her room and put them all over her bed. She loved it although I think she was a little confused. She kept asking why there were balloons in her bed. That morning her and daddy made pancakes with sprinkles and then she opened presents from mom and dad. She got a tag reader with some tag books and a few new boards games. She got to take cupcakes and special princess napkins to preschool to share with her friends which she loved! She was so excited for it to finally be her birthday after she had talked about it for MONTHS and we had been on major birthday count down since brother's birthday at the end of January. It was so much fun seeing how excited she was about everything.

Her actual birthday party with friends was going to be the following Saturday but that didn't happen since she woke up Tuesday night with the stomach bug. It was a TERRIBLE stomach bug and poor sweet girl wasn't herself for an entire week. Thankfully Gigi had flown in the day before and was able to help since we were trying to keep Clara and Miles separated. No one else got sick but we had to cancel the party which she still reminds us of occassionally (a month and a half later).  We still had a little family party with extended family even though she still didn't feel 100%. She made a cake with Gigi and opened a few more presents, followed by a very long nap.

We love our Clara bear to pieces and can't believe how fast she is growing up!