Joshua Dan turned 3!

 Since Josh is at an age where he can really get excited about things, we were hyping up his birthday for a few weeks leading up to it. He was so excited to finally have it be his “Happy Birthday”.  Leading up to his birthday and even on the day of I would catch him singing happy birthday to himself.  It was pretty awesome. 

 

We kept this year’s birthday pretty low-key.  Because of Jake’s schedule, we really only had a small window where we could celebrate and so we just did it with us.  We had lunch with pizza (Josh’s favorite) and his train cake, which is the kind of cake he chose out, and just hung out and played outside afterward until nap-time and until Jake had to go to work.    

 

He got some really great gifts this year including Frank the Fish (from his Auntie’s), a basketball hoop (a couple weeks before his birthday from Jensen’s), a sand/water activity table (combined gift with Audree from the Hunt’s), a Styrofoam airplane, T-ball set, little motorcycle, and some new shoes.  What was funny was to watch how excited he was to open the shoes.

Playing with their new activity table, while it's both inside and out of the box. :)

Over the past year, Josh has grown up so much!  He has not only started talking, but finished out his birthday week by being potty trained!  What a grown up, big boy he is. 

Some things that he currently is doing or is really in to: 

He loves to bake with mom!  It really is one of his favorite things to do.  As soon as he hears the mixer going he has to pull up a chair to help.  We made playdough recently and I also started letting him make bread with me.  I let him knead his own little piece of bread and had him make a "bear bread" with me.  A long tradition that my Grandma Jane would do with her grandkids, kids and the children she tended.  It started out making a little bread dough into the shape of a bear and taking it home and evolved into letting the kids make whatever they want. This last time around with Josh, we made a "car bread".  So fun to be making those same traditions alive again with my own kids.  

He loves trains!! We actually had to take away his wooden train track set because he became so defensive about it and turned into a little mean boy while playing with it.  Hopefully a few weeks of that put away will calm him down about it. 

He loves friends and playtime!!  He lives to get out and see friends.  Anyone (and I mean anyone) who comes over, he’ll follow around, talk to and try and play with them.  I say anyone, because we recently had our property manager come over to fix some things and as soon as he walked in Josh followed him everywhere, chatting with him, and wanting to play with him.  It’s pretty sweet to see how social he is.   Here he is crying because we had to come inside after playing with friends.

 

He loves parks!! I’m so happy that Josh has finally come around motor and personality wise to enjoy parks.  He can now climb on just about anything and loves going down the slides.  He calls any park that we go to the “slide park”.  So fun!! 

He is so smart!!  Over the past year, he has caught on to things so quickly.  He has learned all of the basics so quickly and we’ve noticed he has an excellent memory. One of his most recent things he’s learned/memorized are all of the prophets.  We have a book that he goes through and with the pictures he can name all of them with their full names.  He does get a little hung up on Brigham Young and Ezra Taft Benson, but overall I think that’s pretty good.

He’s potty trained!! Like I mentioned before, this kid finally came around with potty training.  It seems like we’ve tried a few times and with no luck after the first ½ day we would usually give up.  But this time we decided to stick it through.  We had him “throw away” all of his diapers and go straight to undies, because he can’t tell the difference between a diaper and a pull-up.  The first ½ day was really terrible.  We had 9 accidents and during the entire day sat on the potty 20+ times.  I remember feeling like if this is how it was always going to be, how was I going to do this and be able to go anywhere.  Luckily, the next couple days it kicked in and before we knew it he was telling me that he even needed to go #2 in the potty, which was a HUGE step for him.  So after a week, we are there!! I’m so proud and so happy that I stuck through it.  Now that he’s officially out of diapers I can’t help but feel like the little baby in him is all grown up.  How sad, but so fun.

I'm sure there are more things that I'm missing on this update, but overall Josh is really a sweet and fun little boy. He is cuddly and loves each of us in his family so dearly.  What an angel boy he is. I'm so lucky to have him.