Last Tuesday was Riley’s third birthday. Berta stayed home to prepare things for the day. She took Riley out and bought a lot of balloons and a cookies-n-creme cake that he picked out himself.
Since we ordered a few things for him from the mail-order toy catalogs as gifts, they were a bit delayed in coming, so we didn’t have any gifts to give him on his birthday. Instead, we all went to the toy store and picked out a few things that Riley liked.
He picked out one of those claw/grabber things, where you squeeze the handle and the claw at the end of the extension arm closes. He also picked out a big two-headed rubber dragon from among the rubber dinosaurs. We convinced him that he might like this staff-glider toy that comes from the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s a “wooden” staff that turns into an air glider, and he’s been flying around on it often since then.
Riley’s a good kid for three years. We’ve got the regular three-year-old torture to deal with. People say that the twos are terrible, but they don’t talk about the threes. The usual frustration at two years that causes the terror is their inability to communicate what they want, but our kids have been talking for quite a while. It’s in the three-year-old’s independence and need to do things for himself that causes the difficulty with Riley these days. And he sure is stubborn about some things.
In the relatively short time he’s been around, he always seemed like he was going to stay small forever. Comparing him to pictures of himself when he was younger, you can see how big he’s really getting. It’s hard to imagine that he’s going to continue to grow up, but I guess that’s part of what these birthday milestones are about.
