A 3 Year Old's Life Story

I got pregnant when I was sixteen.

All my friends tried to talk me into getting an abortion. Abortion in the state of California is legal for a teenage girl to get without telling her parents. However, I refused to get an abortion until I told my mom that I was pregnant.

4 1/2 months along is when I finally told her. My mom could tell that I had beaten myself up enough over the whole thing, and instead of responding in anger, she replied with love and compassion. She was hurt of course that I thought she would be angry, and that I had lied to her a couple times when she almost found out on her own. But she was an understanding mom.

When all was said and done, I decided to keep the baby, and started enjoying my pregnancy after that...

I'm sure you are wondering where Daddy has been in all of this?

David, lived in Chico during my pregnancy. He had planned on moving local by the time she was born, but because she came two weeks early, he was two weeks late! LOL... Ever since then he has always been in the picture.

We were married two years later!

Yup, she went through it!
And she is still going through it even though she is almost 3 (Feb. 2009).

This is where I have experienced a lot of growth as a parent! When she was a baby all was easy (and I use this word lightly). But really... With babies you deal with feeding, changing, bathing, and watching them sleep.



They are easy to deal with until they start crawling. Then in comes baby gates and child-proofing ones home. But at this age, they still sleep a lot and you take all your joy in dressing them up.



Then comes the toddling about. Yet they still don't have the ability to throw fits, throw toys at you, hit you in anger, or cause a scene in the grocery store. And those are just a few things in the list I can come up with containing all my experiences with this seemingly sweet little girl this year!



You first meet her, and she will win your over with her bouncy blond curls, shyness, and smile. And then when she starts talking, people melt! She has a sweet little voice, and by the grace of God manners have taken root in her!

But if you spend more than 3 hours with us, you will begin to see the sin in her come out. With mommy and daddy there is no "please" anymore. She just uses that with other people to deceive them!

When Willow was 18 months old she started climbing out of her playpen, which was her makeshift bed. And ever since then she has been too smart for her own good.

As she has grown, her intelligence has amazed me!
She knows how old she is, and when her birthday is. She can carry on a conversation with almost anyone as well. When we are at the grocery store, she asks everybody's name! And that is followed by a "how are you?" Most people don't know what to think of her, and they reply, but in a shocked sort of tone. She is quite the social butterfly!

She gets along with almost everyone of any age. She can get down on the floor with a baby and crawl around with it and kiss it. She can also talk to an adult easily.

She takes her baby "Jamie" and does everything to her that I do with Willow.
She changes her diaper, feeds her meals, has tea with her, sleeps with her (which Willow and I do rarely now, but it is fun to wake up with her snuggling with me); she takes her everywhere we go too.

She responds to movies. If someone is getting hurt, she says "oh no!"
She gets really sad when Pooh cannot find Christopher Robin in "Pooh's Grand Adventure."
She gets excited when the good guys are winning in a movie!

She knows all of her ABC's, and she can count to 15.
When her Papa brought her a pink laptop, Vtec, she was obsessed with it, and is learning so much off of it!

She can build a block castle without help.
When we go to the park, she can do everything now without help.
She loves to play soccer, and she loves to sing!

She memorizes songs fast too.
If I sing a new song to her, she will make me sing it over and over again a dozen times. Then for the next week she will be walking around the house singing it. Her favorite song is "Do Rae Me" from "The Sound of Music."

Every day her vocabulary is growing, and she is coming up with different sentence structures all the time! She say phrases that have never been said around her (that I know of) and I just laugh! When kids her age were suppose to be saying 3-word sentences, she was saying 6! Now she will say, "My name is Willow. I am 2 1/2 and I will be 3 in February."

Every little girl has her favorite toys, here are some of them: