Ezra is three and a half as of March 16! He can hold up three fingers an tell you he's three - and he also usually answers "How are you?" with "Three." Which is a pretty apt answer.
The first half of three has been challenging. Well, Ezra is not a particularly difficult child, so challenging is relative, but our darling two year old morphed into a sometimes defiant little dude who can get a really mean look on his face at times and has meltdowns over the most seemingly innocuous things. Our adventurous eater who used to enjoy any spicy sauce he tried has more recently been preferring things like plain rice, buttered noodles, and would eat nothing but M&Ms if we let him.
From commiserating with friends, these things seem to be normal "threenager" behaviors, but this past year has truly been hard on Ezra - a new baby brother, a cross-country move, starting preschool three afternoons a week, and numerous job and schedule changes for both of his parents are not easy things for a little guy to cope with. Some anxiety was evident, and he still misses Denver - as do Ross and I. Our lives have settled down somewhat and so has Ezra's mood.
Recently though, we're seeing more and more of Ezra's sweet nature shining through again. He is really learning to regulate his emotions - he will try to avoid getting angry with Asher for interrupting his play, or his eyes might fill up with tears and his lip quiver when he's upset but then he takes deep breaths and doesn't erupt into sobs.
His speech has improved by leaps and bounds in the past six months or so. He talks more, he's much easier to understand, he puts many phases together into long sentences, and he narrates his play. Funnily enough, I think some of the three year old defiance has channeled into language as a tendency to make every statement negative. For a while, and somewhat still, nearly every question he asked and statement he made was in the negative, even when he wasn't protesting - as in, "Is today not a school day?" "Is that store not Target?" (as we walk into Target), "Asher is not holding a toy" (when Asher is holding a toy). When he is upset, he absolutely always defaults to "NO!" even when he wants to say yes - so there is the funny phenomenon of asking an upset Ezra a question to which we are pretty sure the answer is yes, and him answering "No!" and then a few seconds later, with exactly the same incredulous or disgusted tone, "...Yes!"
The first half of three has been challenging. Well, Ezra is not a particularly difficult child, so challenging is relative, but our darling two year old morphed into a sometimes defiant little dude who can get a really mean look on his face at times and has meltdowns over the most seemingly innocuous things. Our adventurous eater who used to enjoy any spicy sauce he tried has more recently been preferring things like plain rice, buttered noodles, and would eat nothing but M&Ms if we let him.
From commiserating with friends, these things seem to be normal "threenager" behaviors, but this past year has truly been hard on Ezra - a new baby brother, a cross-country move, starting preschool three afternoons a week, and numerous job and schedule changes for both of his parents are not easy things for a little guy to cope with. Some anxiety was evident, and he still misses Denver - as do Ross and I. Our lives have settled down somewhat and so has Ezra's mood.
Recently though, we're seeing more and more of Ezra's sweet nature shining through again. He is really learning to regulate his emotions - he will try to avoid getting angry with Asher for interrupting his play, or his eyes might fill up with tears and his lip quiver when he's upset but then he takes deep breaths and doesn't erupt into sobs.
His speech has improved by leaps and bounds in the past six months or so. He talks more, he's much easier to understand, he puts many phases together into long sentences, and he narrates his play. Funnily enough, I think some of the three year old defiance has channeled into language as a tendency to make every statement negative. For a while, and somewhat still, nearly every question he asked and statement he made was in the negative, even when he wasn't protesting - as in, "Is today not a school day?" "Is that store not Target?" (as we walk into Target), "Asher is not holding a toy" (when Asher is holding a toy). When he is upset, he absolutely always defaults to "NO!" even when he wants to say yes - so there is the funny phenomenon of asking an upset Ezra a question to which we are pretty sure the answer is yes, and him answering "No!" and then a few seconds later, with exactly the same incredulous or disgusted tone, "...Yes!"
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