Our little girl is 3 years old today. It’s hard to believe. Time has gone by so fast.

To document this milestone in her life I thought I’d talk about some of her favorite things, her quirks, etc. I know you all hear about all things Bridget all the time, but be prepared for more. Lots more. I also have about 27 pictures (literally) to attempt to summarize her life thus far.

First…

THEN (11/23/05)

AND NOW (9/3/08)

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Bridget Today
Bridget currently has shoulder-length brown hair and hazel eyes. She weighs 32 lbs, and is 37″ tall. Her favorite color is light pink. Not dark pink, light pink. She loves PEZ dispensers, baby dolls, and princesses. Lately she’s taken a liking to “little things” – Polly Pocket style dolls, or pocket sized animals, etc. She has a very active imagination. She loves to play pretend (you be the mom, and I’ll be the baby), carry around purses, and cook elaborate meals in her kitchen. She has two imaginary friends, Fuf-uff and Didi – typically they are well behaved and great playmates. But occasionally they have issues that need to be resolved. I’m still not sure the gender, race, or even species of Fuf-uff and Didi… but I do know that they are short. Some days they don’t have legs and can’t walk. Other days they have cars (Fuf-uff’s is yellow, and Didi’s is blue).

From a young age (prior to her first birthday) we began exposing Bridget to American Sign Language. She still likes the Signing Time videos and has recently started to make efforts to expand her ASL knowledge and vocabulary. She regularly asks me how to sign things (washcloth, chips, potato, full, etc), and she sometimes tries to make up her own signs for things. She asks for things in Sign Language (sometimes instead of in English) pretty regularly… usually food related things. Milk in a cup, a napkin, cereal, or candy. And she even corrects the signing of others when she catches it (e.g. when daddy inadvertently signed “sorry” when he meant to sign “please”). We attribute much of her language skills to that early (and continued exposure) to Sign Language.

The kid is a sponge. She remembers things really well, and thrives on additional learning. She knows her alphabet, she can count to 20 most of the time (though she sometimes gets hung up on 14), and she can recognize many of her letters – some she can even write. She can spell “Mom” and “Dad” in English and in ASL, and she can write it. Occasionally when someone asks me to spell my name (usually my last name) she’ll chime in and announce that you spell it M-O-M. Too cute. She can recognize some other written words and can shape most of her letters with a little bit of help. Her spoken vocabulary includes words like “actually,” “incredible,” and “amazing.”

She knows the words to songs like “I am a child of God” and “A child’s prayer,” but she can also sing most of the words to “Its time for some Campaign’in” and to several of the “Dr. Horrible” songs. She is generally a pretty brave child, she doesn’t get scared easily, and she usually gets it when we explain that some things are just pretend. However, she somewhat recently developed a slight fear of dinosaurs and “iron mans.” The first is because of the dinosaur in the show “Meet the Robinsons”… she is convinced that dinosaurs come during the night to eat her hair. As for the fear of “iron mans” that started after she watched portions of “Iron Man” with daddy and I. She tells me, “I don’t like Iron Mans.” We explained that the things we watch in movies and on TV are pretend. Still, I have to check each room in the house before bed to make sure that there are no dinosaurs or iron men. After that she sleeps just fine.

In terms of other sorts of development, she can run, hop, jump, and gallop (though she thinks she’s skipping). She can string beads (or fruit loops), cut with scissors, and use her pincer grip to pick up and manipulate small objects. She can dress herself (save a little help with buttons and the fact that she thinks that a pink shirt, red polka dot pants and un-matching green and purple socks make the perfect outfit), brush her hair, and use the toilet by herself. She THINKS she can tie her shoes, but it just ends up being a stack of knots. And she THINKS she can whistle, though little sound escapes her lips – truthfully, she’s better at it than I am.

She loves playing games… Old Maid, Go Fish, Matching Games, and especially daddy’s train game. She also likes to play games on the computer, mostly stuff from PBSKids.org. She is getting pretty good at manipulating the mouse. She loves to scroll through people’s blogs with me and look at their pictures and watch the little video clips. She actually even knows about YouTube and can easily navigate her way around the related videos. Because of this, we had to password protect our computer screens, and she lost some iPod privileges – she discovered YouTube on my iPod the other day when she was supposed to be playing memory.

She’s working on learning to recognize her numbers (particularly digital numbers), write more of her letters, and she’s working on building more advanced puzzles (e.g. 25 piece cardboard puzzles).

I’m sure there is much more I could say about our big girl, but I’ll stop there. We love her dearly though and we continue to be amazed at the things she’s learning, doing, and saying. We have quite the character on our hands! Bridget, we love you!

Also… here are a few pictures over the past 3 years… She only has a birthday once a year, right?!

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11/23/05 (4:07 a.m.) – The first time I held my little angel.

11/23/05 – Clean and ready to face the world.

11/26/05 – Daddy feeding her.

11/28/05 – Sleeping Beauty, 5 days old.

12/17/05 – Christmas pictures.

1/8/06 – Blessing Day.

4/20/06 – Playing with daddy. Hello chubby baby!

5/3/06 – Her first Oreo. And photo-op.

7/6/06 – Daddy’s hands.

9/15/06 – Eating bread.

11/25/06 – 2 days after her first birthday! Eating her cake, and sharing too!

12/5/06 – First year portraits.

1/30/07 – Playing dress-up. She LOVED shoes at this stage in her life.

2/23/07 – Big helper!

3/1/07 – Independent eater. And very messy.

7/14/07 – Signing “Dad” – Special Father’s Day portraits.

10/31/07 – Pebbles for Halloween.

11/21/07 – Second Year Portraits.

11/25/07 – 2nd Birthday party! She loved Elmo.

12/11/07 – Making (and tasting) Christmas cookies.

12/12/07 – Dress-up/”Ready for work” and early potty training time.

1/30/08 – Stringing Fruit Loops. One of the rare times she’s let me really curl her hair.

3/3/08 – More dress-up. She loved those glasses!

4/11/08 – Baby Animal days – getting to know a turkey.

7/24/08 – Pioneer Day parade.

9/3/08 – First day of “preschool” at the Family Center.