It was time for Trevor to crawl into his bed for his afternoon nap, but he was insisting on putting his toy trucks to bed first.
He’d named many of them: Pete, Bob, Sally, Sink …
I grabbed several clean diapers and tucked each vehicle, one at a time, into its own personal diaper “bed.”
“There, all cozy. They’re all going to go fast asleep,” I said.
“Fast asleep? How do you go slow asleep?” Trevor responded.
These are the kind of sentences Tru comes up with daily, and they’re one of the big reasons why I’m loving age three more than any other age so far.
The sentences he puts together, the questions he comes up with, the mispronunciation of words: it all adds up to basically the biggest package of adorableness I’ve ever witnessed.
He has trouble combining certain sounds, for example.
The other day, he was looking at his toy truck and he asked, “how Tehvah fix cuck cunk?”
This translates to, “how does Trevor fix the truck trunk?”
Instead of “anymore,” Trevor says “evermore,” and he uses it interchangeably with “forever.”
So he’ll say something like, “I love strawberries, evermore” or “I won’t see you again, evermore?”
It’s pretty much the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.
As his language skills have exploded, he’s started to spin quite the tall tale, which is very cute:
Me: “who did you play with at school today?”
Tru: “I played with Brayden. Brayden has a Mama and a Daddy. He has one Mama and one Daddy and one Brayden. And one dog. His dog’s name is Pete. Pete is yellow and green. Pete has a yellow tail and a brown nose. Brayden has a yellow nose …”
And another: “Tehvah saw green cheese. There was green cheese at Uncle Dave’s house. It went down his slide. It was BIG green cheese and it broke the slide! And Daddy had to fix it…”
He’s interested in counting these days too.
He’ll line up his toy trucks on the couch and count them carefully and slowly. He sometimes skips 13 or 17, but the pride on his face is what makes me melt!
He also loves to sing the alphabet and he’s very curious about learning to recognize and write letters.
He knows and will often say “T is for Tehvah.”
Whenever he sees a “T,” on a store sign or a license plate, he’ll point it out: “T is for Tehvah!”
I have a purple Under Armour sweatshirt I wear all of the time, and he’ll point to the “M” and say, “M is for Mama!”
He’s also very good at drawing the letter “T,” and he’s attempting to write some other letters.
He does a good “A” and “H” and a “C” that opens downward instead of to the side.
“Tehvah do it all by his own,” he’ll say with pride.
Several times a day he’ll ask “what starts with ______” (fill in the blank with any item he happens to see in front of him – grass, cookie, store, etc.)
And then I’ll tell him the first letter of that word.
There’s a downside to all of the language growth, though.
Here’s a line that came out of his mouth recently:
“I don’t like you, Mama. I DON’T like you. I want Daddy.”
This happened when Chris had to leave for work and Trevor didn’t want him to.
His words made me cry.
To devote all of your time, your body, your heart and soul to raising your child, and then hear, “I don’t like you”…
I think Shakespeare called it “sharper than a serpent’s tooth.”
He hit the nail on the head with that perfect phrase.
Within a couple of hours, though, Tru was hugging and kissing me and saying, “I wuv you Mama.”
So I’ve learned that his words and feelings, while genuine, are extremely fickle and fleeting.
True to “threenager” form, he’s also extremely bossy these days!
The other day he pulled on my sweatshirt sleeves while saying, “pull your sleeves down!”
Another example: we’ve started playing the Candy Land board game.
If I pick a card with an image of a piece of candy (most of the cards just have a color), he’ll grab it from my hand.
“No, this one is not for Mama. Pick another card,” he’ll say and put it back in the pile, face up.
Then he’ll pick the candy card for his turn.
Sometimes, he’ll ask if I want to build a tower of LEGO blocks with him, and I’ll start building with some blue pieces.
“No, not blue Mama. You get white,” he’ll order.
Speaking of LEGOs, Trevor calls them “leg-a-goes.”
He adds an “ah” sound to the middle of the word.
I find it so cute, I’ve started saying it the same way. I’m sure I’m supposed to correct him, but instead I just say, “do you want to play leg-a-goes?”
And Trevor always wants to play leg-a-goes.
He has a mini wagon full of the large DUPLO LEGOS, plus a big plastic bag full of them (all given as gifts).
Every day, he dumps that wagon full onto the playroom floor. And the big bag too.
Our home is basically a tornado of leg-a-goes.
Aside from LEGOs and Candy Land, Tru also likes to color and play with Play Doh.
His obsession with all things vehicle-related is as strong as ever.
We spend the majority of our hours together “playing cars” and constructing race tracks and BRIO train tracks.
He continues to wear either his blue or red Lightning McQueen sweatshirt each and every day (unless we tell him they’re “in the wash”).
One of his favorite outfits is his Lightning McQueen sweatshirt, a colorful red plaid button-down, and blue sweatpants that have a star pattern.
He calls the shirt his “rainbow shirt” and the pants his “star pants.”
His Grammy and Grandpa moved into a house only a half hour from our house, so he’s been spending his Saturdays with his grandparents, which he loves.
Somehow he instinctively knows when it’s the weekend and he’ll say, “Tehvah go to Grammy’s house today. Tehvah sleep at Grammy’s house.”
He’ll get his Lightning McQueen sweatshirts out of the closet and select socks from his sock drawer, and go about packing up his bag all by himself.
He takes such pride in it!
Last time, he also selected two items he found in the yard to pack in his overnight bag: one large rock and a stick in the shape of a “T.”
He calls the stick his “T stick.”
He placed the rock in a small pocket in the bag, zipped it up, and said, “put this here, where it’s safe.”
Our bedtime routine is as exhausting as ever.
Tru will use every stalling tactic he can dream up to avoid getting into bed.
He always asks to watch “color cars” YouTube videos for about 10 minutes after his bath and before bed.
Then, it’s time for books.
He has a new favorite that he’s been choosing every night, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry.
It’s a humorous book filled with colorful illustrations of every imaginable kind of vehicle.
Basically it’s a dream book for toddler boys, but with one problem for parents: it’s 70 pages long.
I have to try to sneakily flip double or triple pages while he’s not paying attention in order to ever get through it.
A lot of nights, he also asks for a snack and a milk while we’re reading books before bed.
So Chris or I will go down to the kitchen and put some peanut butter on his bunny crackers.
It’s another ten minutes for Tru to avoid going to bed, but I do love that time, holding him in my lap on the floor while he crunches on peanut butter crackers, flipping through books…
Sometimes we’ll turn out the lights and use his little plastic toy space projector to look at slides on the ceiling.
He loves pointing things out:
“There’s the moon, there’s Jupiter with an eye, there’s earf, Tevah lives on earf, there’s a BIG meatball…”
Speaking of sleeping, Trevor has a “big boy bed” now!
When Tru was only one, he attempted to climb out of his crib and landed on his head.
Chris and I had tucked him in for the night, closed the door and started to walk away, when we heard a big thump and then his cries.
We walked in to find him on the floor, clutching his head.
He was just fine, but the accident scared him.
He never attempted to crawl out of his crib ever again after that night.
So, based on the stories I’ve heard about toddlers crawling out of their beds and wandering the house at all hours of the night, I would have happily kept Tru in his crib for much longer.
The problem was that we needed to get him used to the idea that he could sleep in a “big boy bed” because he completely outgrew his Pack ‘n Play.
Since he wanted his “crib” when we traveled or when he went to stay overnight with his grandparents, he was still sleeping in a much-too-small Pack ‘n Play.
It was time.
He has a convertible crib, so his “big boy bed” is still basically a crib on three sides.
But one long side has a rail instead of the crib wall, so he can climb into and out of bed on his own.
The funny thing: we switched him to a bed so late, he just follows his old ingrained habit without thinking.
He never climbs out of bed!
When he wakes up, he just calls out for Chris and I instead.
I’m literally knocking on wood as I type this, so I don’t jinx it!
While we’re on the subject of beds, one last favorite memory for now.
After he wakes up in the morning (typically 6:45 am), Tru loves to crawl under the covers in Chris’s and my bedroom.
He could never just lie still, he’s got way too much energy for that.
But he will lay in between us and watch videos on the phone for a few minutes.
I love having that time to cuddle with him.
What a world of difference from the baby stage, when my mornings began with Tru wailing at 5:30 am…
Like I said, I’m really loving age three so far!
