Dominic - 3.5 years old

Because of COVID (or maybe in spite of COVID), the last 6 months seemed to go by in a span of 2 months. Dom is already 3 and a half! There has been some significant development on his part, and he is totally a little preschooler now. Hopefully he can go to preschool in September, but COVID dictates our lives now, so we'll see!

Weight: 40-42 lb (97+ percentile)
Height: 41 inches (90th percentile)

Likes:

• Lego (mostly building Millenium Falcons, Tie Fighters, and Anakin's freighter apparently). 
• Star Wars, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
• Cars - This has been a constant for about 2.5 years now. 
• Reading books
• Playing "pretend" and other imagination games. 
• Riding his bike, and driving his BMW
• 7pm cowbells (every night our neighbourhood bangs pots and pans and rings cowbells for the first responders in the COVID crisis - this is the cue for bedtime)
• Singing: ABC's, Rewrite the Stars (from the Greatest Showman), Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You
• Benny - definitely his best friend ever. They play so well together. Benny is gentler with Dom than other people, and Dom has the right amount of assertiveness vs. playfulness with Benny. Super cute!

Dislikes:

• Surprises - he's naturally pretty anxious, so I try to prepare him for everything that may be different than he's expecting. 
• Feeling pressure to react a certain way - oh this boy... He got it from his mama :)
• Loud noises. Anything he perceives to be loud upsets him and he plugs his ears. At mom and dads last week he was playing upstairs for a long time. I went to check on him and heard a bunch of crashing through the closed door. I peeked my head in and saw he had dumped marbles down the marble works and was standing back watching and plugging his ears. 

Notes:

• NO MORE DIAPERS! About the day before COVID quarantine started (March 15) we went to my mom's house to see their new kitchen. We sat at the island, and Mom asked what we were doing this week. Dom proudly announced, "I'm potty training!" It was the first I'd heard of it, but we were prepared with potty training gear from an attempt a few months earlier. The next day we woke up and put underwear on him, and he never looked back. To this day *knock knock* he has never had an accident. It was literally the flip of a switch. Hallelujah!
• Size 5T clothing, and 10C shoes.
• We bought him a helmet for riding his bike that should fit 3-5 year olds it says, but we could not get it on his head... we have now upsized and he's wearing a helmet for 5+ year olds. I forget sometimes that he's 3.5, but the size of a 5 year old. 
• I could copy and paste my note about his love for cars from his three year post. He still knows them so much better than I do. He's also constantly talking about their engines. He knows about combustion chambers, spark plugs, pistons, fuel lines... 
• He wants to know how everything works. Other than cars, he's especially interested in the human body and sewer system (preschooler potty humour anyone?). He can tell you about the digestive system, "We chew our food, and then it goes down down our esophagus, and then into our stomach. Then it goes around and around in our intestines and our large instestine, and then its poop and goes in the potty from our bums!" He knows that liquid turns into pee that goes into our bladder and out his penis.
  He's super interested in the heart and how it works to pump blood around the body. He asks me multiple times a day to explain the 4 chambers and how blood picks up oxygen and how it gets around our body. He knows it has 4 chambers, goes into the heart, through two chambers, then to the lungs to pick up oxygen, back to the heart, through two more chambers and then to the body.
  Speaking of circulatory system and blood, he got a scratch one day and noticed it a while later. He said, "Mommy, I got a scratch!" I said, "Oh no, are you okay?" He says, "Ya, my platelets came and fixed it." Alrighty then! Smarty-pants. 
• While he's all smart about the human body when talking with me, he seems to get a little mixed up when trying to tell Emilia or while playing. He was playing cloud dough this week and I overheard this:
  "The poop and pee gets mixed up by oxygen. And comes right out our penis and bums. Then it brings oxygen all the way back to our lungs." ... So close...
• Can count to 20, knows his 20's if we prompt him. Can count (with the Mickey Mouse song) by 10's to 100.
• Knows his ABC's very well and is teaching Emilia. 
• He can read an analog clock. He doesn't know specific times very well yet, or grasp what 9:30 looks like, but he can look at the clock and know it's lunch time, breakfast time, quiet time, cowbells time, dinner times, etc. He asked to learn this completely on his own. 
• He is starting to write letters. He can't quiet do it 100% on his own, but if I write the letters in pencil, he can trace them. 
• Tries to stay in the lines when he's colouring. For about two minutes, and then it's a free for all. 
• He's pretty bossy with Emilia (typical first born). He dictates the games much of the time, and reminds her (and me) of the rules.
• He's still very attached to his one blanket, and has added some stuffed animals to the mix now. He has a little teddy bear he got when he was born (or maybe even before as a baby shower gift), a stuffed puppy that looks like Benny, another stuffed puppy, and a little sloth that was actually a gift for Emilia for her second baby - not sure how Dom ended up with it!

I felt like his hair looked a little dweeb-y, so I wet it a bit haha.