Asher Turns 3

Asher's 3rd birthday has come and gone, and now he feels even more grown up than ever!  I love having him around (most of the time...) and it's so fun to watch him learn and play and interact with the world around him.  I'll start off with some things about Asher:

• This boy loves to jump and climb and run and do all things active.  He'll run laps around our living room every day for about 30 minutes, just because.  He loves to climb on anyone sitting down.  And he can't just climb off something, he has to jump off.
• He moved into his big boy bed and seems to really like it.  He goes down pretty easy for naps, but getting him to stay in bed for bedtime is still a bit of a struggle.  But we're learning.  Also, he has figured out that if he wakes up in the middle of the night, he can come climb in our bed!  This happens maybe twice a week, and while I get annoyed that I don't sleep as well, I secretly kind of like it.  Sometimes I wake up enough to put him back in his bed, sometimes not.  But even if he does sleep in his bed all night, he wakes me up by climbing into our bed anyways and moving around until I wake up enough to get up.
• He's very good at pushing his limits!  I know it's all part of the toddler stage, but it gets a little frustrating at times.
• His favorite thing in the world is probably going swimming!  The Mitchell genes show through!
• Loves loves loves Millie.  Sometimes a little too aggressively.  But she's very tolerant and he loves to maul her!
• Mostly potty trained.  We still have accident every now and then and I still have him in a diaper at night, but he's usually dry in the morning.
• Thinks that Dad is the coolest person on the planet and is way more fun to play with than Mom.
• Loves playing with other kids!  
• Talks so much now!  Speech was such a good thing for Asher.  It was a lot of work and I know it was hard for him, but it's really paid off because he is now back on track!  I love having conversations with him and getting to know his personality even more.
• He remembers things much better now.  He tells me he misses Ledger, or that Isaac and Hunter live in Idaho, or when we went swimming he asked if Joy Joy was coming.  For the week before his birthday, he had me sing Happy Birthday to all his toys and was so excited for cake!  It's so fun to have him be excited for things, I can't wait for all the holidays coming up!

For his birthday, we didn't have a lot of money to do stuff so I thought it would be fun to do all his favorite things.  We watched a movie in the morning during breakfast, then I blew up some balloons and we played "keep the balloon off the floor" for an entire hour (which made me surprisingly tired) and then we went swimming with Brittany!  Brittany surprised Asher with a play kitchen which he has so much fun with.  I did still make him take a nap (he is much happier when he takes a nap) and afterwards we did presents and cake and then went to Arctic Circle where he got ice cream and got to play on the toys!  I think he even got to stay up an extra hour that night.  All in all, I think he had a pretty good day!

He made David play with the balloons later that night.  Millie even got in on the action!

Don't mind the underwear...

My fantastic cake!  And his Transformers robot.  Which went everywhere with us for the next 4 days.

While we were in Idaho, I told my mom I felt bad I didn't have more professional pictures of Asher.  It seemed like we were always moving and just never had the time or money to do it.  So while my sister was getting her son's newborn pictures taken, they arranged with her to get Asher's pictures taken as a present for his birthday! And the photographer is even moving to North Carolina, for all my in-laws out there!  I didn't have any nice clothes for Asher, so Joni let us borrow some of Ledger's.   I love these pictures and am so happy we have them. 

I think this one is my favorite. :)

This picture was impossible to get!  It was so hard for Asher to work those little fingers to only hold 3 of them up!