Happy 3rd Birthday, Rachel!

Obviously, I have to do a better job of writing more regularly. And here we are, nearly a week after Rachel's birthday, and I am just now sitting down to write this. Seems like the kids' birthdays are always either right before or right after a vacation (in this case, right before)....so I get caught up in preparing for that, plus the fact that the birthday itself is actually more like a weeklong celebration, all parts of which keep me very busy!

Rachel's 3rd birthday was this past Wednesday. Bill took the day off, as has become his tradition. We started the morning at Megan's ballet class (an eight day "camp" that she is doing this summer, to see if she likes ballet....which she does). After that we had lunch at McDonald's (notable for the large puddle of spilled milk that Rachel found herself sitting in....she knocked over her milk jug and it somehow managed to totally miss her shirt, but landed entirely on her high chair seat). Then we were off to Ven Roy's for our annual blueberry picking excursion. It was mighty hot, but the girls were troopers for awhile. Megan was quite industrious and picked a lot of berries. Rachel did slightly better than last year, in that more berries made it into her bucket as opposed to her stomach, but after about 30 minutes, she pretty much refused to put anything in her bucket. Thereafter all of them went into her mouth. We left there with about 8 pounds of blueberries, a good haul considering the ridiculous afternoon heat. I had to make room in the freezer for this year's crop, since many of last year's are still in our freezer. Guess I need to make more muffins and blueberry pancakes. Megan is very disappointed that I don't know how to make a blueberry pie. Perhaps I will learn...

After blueberry picking, we headed off to the Cone Shop for some ice cream. Then it was home to open presents. Rachel was very excited about the mini trampoline she got, the Dora umbrella, and she also loves the chest of dress-up clothes and accessories. She is quite a little princess and loves prancing around the house in tutus and princess dresses and shoes. Of course, no Ahrens child birthday would be complete without dinner out at Bob Evans. Yummm...it's the girls' favorite, for some reason. They always get pancakes. At home, we enjoyed a decorated giant chocolate chip cookie from Meijer (the homemade cake was saved for Saturday's party). Rachel picked that over a store-bought yellow cake, which was all they had the day we were there.

Birthday week continued with a cupcake party for our neighborhood playgroup on Thursday. Rachel was having a beach birthday theme, so I decorated cupcakes with "sand" (ground up graham cracker) and candy shells. We were supposed to go outside and have water play, but it rained.

On Saturday, the "official" birthday party was held, with Nana, Papa, Grammy, Gaga, Paul, Dorothy, Uncle Bob, Aunt Keri, and Bobby and Allison (Stacey is in Finland with her boyfriend Nick). The theme was a beach party, and I made a sandcastle cake to go along with that. Not as easy as I'd hoped, but certainly not as difficult as Tinkerbell! The kids had lots of fun kicking around the ten pink beach balls we had scattered about. We decorated the kitchen with beach towels, beach ball and beach bucket cutouts, and real seashells. Bill made a fun "beach music" playlist, complete with Beach Boys, steel drum music, and other summer-themed songs. Once again our plans of water play outside were thwarted by rain, but the kids still had fun just playing together.

To me, three years old really marks the end of babyhood. Rachel is still straddling that line...one minute, she wants to be independent and do everything herself, and the next minute, she is hanging on me and wanting me to carry her around, and talking in babytalk. So who is Rachel at three years old? She is fiercely stubborn. Just tonight she was standing on the bathroom stool at the sink and I picked her up and set her on the ground. She said, "No, I step down!" and proceeded to step back on the stool and get down on her own. She is so proud of herself that she can climb into her car seat herself, with the help of a step stool. She recently learned to gallop, and loves to say, "Mama, watch!" as she gallops behind the toy shopping cart. Rachel loves to read books to herself and will often tell me to "Go away!" if I come close and try to sit next to her on the couch. She certainly holds her own in arguments with Megan (and I daresay, at times even terrorizes her big sister. Megan is very accommodating and sweet, and it is usually Rachel who has taken a toy, or pushed her sister, or done something similarly naughty.).

Sometimes it frightens me how fickle and moody Rachel can already be; we are in for it when she becomes a teenager! Often when I go into her room to get her in the morning, I am greeted with, "No! Go away!" or "No, DADDY!!!" I have to give her time to decide that she wants to get up, on her own terms. When she doesn't get her way, she can get going in such a tantrum that it becomes hard for her to shut it off, even when given an "out." Her emotions overwhelm her, I think.

Yet she can be the sweetest little girl on the planet. Sometimes she'll say, "Snuggle me, Mama," and will just cuddle into me on my lap. Tonight when I was singing her bedtime songs to her, she asked, "Where's the baby?" and when I pointed to my belly, she gave my belly a kiss. She is very excited to become a big sister and thinks it's really neat that she gets to be both a big sister and a little sister at the same time! She thinks it's hilarious when we tickle her, and when we use her foot to pretend to "talk on the foot phone." I really cherish the times when Rachel actually lets me hold her little hand as we walk down the sidewalk. Sometimes she will just say, "I love you, Mama," out of the blue. I try to remember those times when I get the "No, DADDY!!!" attitude.

A big milestone we have yet to reach is potty training. Rachel doesn't seem to have any interest in it, no matter how much we talk about it, or which way I present it. We've had a couple of "intensive diaper-free days" this summer, which did not really achieve the desired effect (but rather, only a puddle on my dining room carpet). She doesn't seem to be motivated by the "big girl" argument, or by wearing princess underwear, or by bribery with candy or toys, or with the "You want to go to preschool, don't you?" argument. I've finally decided to just leave it alone for now, and hopefully Little Miss Stubborn will decide, on her own terms, in her own time (hopefully sooner rather than later) that she's ready. She really seems to want to take ballet this fall (after two weeks of watching big sister), and I have casually told her that ballet class does not allow diapers. Hopefully this will serve as some motivation, if nothing else will!

I'm sure this year will bring lots of changes, not only in our family, with the addition of a new sibling and with Megan starting school, but also for Rachel herself. I remember that Megan made big leaps and bounds emotionally and intellectually between the ages of three and four. I am excited to see what this year brings for my sweet Rachel. No matter what shenanigans she pulls, or how much she tries my patience, I wouldn't change a thing about her (OK, maybe I'd like her to eat better, but besides that....). I love every facet of her strong and beautiful personality. Here's to a wonderful year of being three!