Happy Birthday Grace!

Today is Grace's 3rd birthday. Every parent always says this, but it's hard to believe how fast time flies. David and I seriously can't believe that it has been 3 years since she came into our lives and yet, we can't really remember what life was like without her (ok - we can remember the times when we use to set our own schedules, and go to a movie on a whim, but it seems like she's always been with us and now life without her would be unimaginable.)

Just in the last year, she has grown up so much. She celebrated her 2nd birthday just a couple of weeks before moving to Massachusetts. When we left Utah, she had a small vocabulary, couldn't say the names of very many relatives, but could put a few words together in sentences, knew most of her ABC's, liked to pretend to type on the computer keyboard, couldn't quite reach the pedals on her new trike, liked to sit on a horse and go for a pony ride, was still small enough for me to carry around for subsantial periods of time (like when I would hold her on my hip in the middle of the ring while teaching a riding lesson!) and was still fairly dependent on me to decide what to do with her day. Her world was very much centered in our family and she didn't perceive that there were lots of other people in the world who might be friends, who might be happy or sad, or who might live close or far away.

Now, she has a vocabulary that is amazing, puts together very long sentences, can spell quite a few things and recognize the shapes of many words so that appears that she can read them, can use the computer better than some adults I've known at work, can type her name out and send e-mails, can fully reach the pedals on her trike, can sit on and steer a horse all by herself, is much too big to carry far (even if I weren't pregnant), and is very much in charge of deciding what she wants to do all day including what she wants to eat, wear, play with, watch on TV, and listen to in the car. She is very affectionate when she wants to be and frequently hugs me, David, the dogs, Tinkerbell, and her friends and says "oh, I love you so much." She tells me at least 5 times a day that I am her best friend. I hope she still says that in 10 years.

Grace is now starting to understand that she lives in a big big world and knows that she lives a long way away from family. She knows that (almost) everyone in the world is someone she might want to have as a friend, and she has empathy for people who are in need. She watched a special on TV with me about Hurricane Katrina victims last week. I told her that those people didn't have houses anymore because their houses got ruined, but that other people were trying to help them find and build new houses. She has talked about it quite a bit since then that those poor people who don't have a house are so sad. I also loaded up several bags of clothes to donate to charity a few weeks ago. At first, she was upset that I was giving our stuff away, but when I told her that some people don't have lots of clothes and might only have one shirt, she immediately changed her tune. She questioningly looked at me and said "they only have one shirt?" She had never considered an idea like that before.

Our little girl is still quite a little girl, but definitely not a baby anymore (you wouldn't be able to tell it by the diapers she still wears, much to our dismay, though!!!) All we know is that we are so happy and lucky to have such a fabulous little daughter and overwhelmed at the idea that we are responsible for how her little life will turn out.

At the risk that no one will read a blog entry this long or one even longer to talk about birthday celebrations, I'm going to make 2 separate entries!