Three!

Yes, it's true, we have a three year old. We are still rather stunned by this fact, but I'm sure it'll sink in eventually.

Kate has been learning about birthday parties, and blowing out candles and things, from Blues Clues and other sources. She's also been fascinated by candles ever since we put one in her jack o' lantern. So we knew we would have to have candles. Not being much into cake, though, we just cut a slab of panettone and stuck the candles in that. (Which was fine--Kate likes panettone.)



Kate watches Daddy light the candles. ("Candles! And little fire!" she said.) She couldn't quite figure out the blowing-out part, so Daddy helped with that.




Kate and the swag. She's finally getting the hang of unwrapping, but still needs a little help. (We've been trying to discourage paper tearing, in general.)




Aww, big smile! "It's Thomas!"



I found these cute boots for Kate (yeah, I forgot to take the price tag off. Oops). We've had a little snow this year (including some on Christmas day, which was lovely), but nothing that stuck. But hey, it could happen. Kate wore her boots when we went out later, and we were singing the Laurie Berkner song, with some adaptation: "In my pink boots! In my pink boots! I stomp around in my pink boots!"



More dinosaur stuff from Scott. Where on earth we're going to put it all, we have no idea.

We went out to the Indian buffet in Lakewood for lunch. Kate ate quite a bit, but finished before we did, of course, and then we had to try to keep her contained while we ate. That was a bit tricky.



After lunch we went over to the nearby Barnes and Noble and hung out there for quite a while. Kate thinks of bookstores as places that have toys. Oh yeah, and books, too. We found some cool pop-ups.



We also got Kate the Scholastic Knuffle Bunny video. Here she is watching it with her daddy (and her pigeon, and her Thomas), and following along in the book. Kate loves the Knuffle Bunny video. I think we've watched it like fifteen times already. (It's short.)

The video has some very cute framing stuff with Mo Willems and his daughter Trixie. (You can see quite a bit of it on amazon.) Oh, and apparently Knuffle Bunny is a girl. Who knew?

In the book, Mo Willems thanks the 358 6th Avenue Laundromat, the site of Knuffle Bunny's misadventure. I wonder if the laundromat has anything celebrating their literary fame. Is there a signed Mo Willems doodle on the wall? Do Knuffle Bunny fans make pilgrimages to the laundromat, and vie for the opportunity to put quarters into the "M" machine?

Kate just came in and saw what I was doing, and wanted to watch Knuffle Bunny again. These scholastic videos are pretty cool. We should get some more.



Our little girl is getting so big! (I know I've said that before, but she keeps getting bigger!) She's talking so much these days, and we are all enjoying the wonders of communication. We can tell each other things! Yes! She still has some pronoun confusion--when she's having trouble with something, she hollers, "Can I help you?" and when she wants to hand us something she holds it out and says, "Give it to me?" She's also become very interested in the smoke alarm, which she calls the "smokel arm." It's too cute. I know we'll miss these baby things as she gets older.

Happy birthday, Kate! I think three will be fun.