Gabriel is three years old

I am writing this sitting in Starbucks as Gabe has his second settling in session at his new nursery. At just three years old this will be the fourth nursery he’s gone to so we’ve been through all this several times before. I know he’ll be fine, and I really think that once he’s settled this nursery will be better for him than the preschool he was at before but it doesn’t make leaving him upset any easier.

Gabriel is three years old

I’m a little overdue with this post – Gabe’s third birthday was actually two weeks ago while we were on holiday in France, and it seems like it was even longer because we actually celebrated his birthday 10 days before that when we first arrived. It was a bit weird to pretend it was his birthday when it wasn’t but we had taken a few presents away with us and it didn’t make sense to keep them until the day before we came home. Of course Gabe is too little to know when his actual birthday is, he just knew it was when we were on holiday so he was none the wiser!

The birthday boy 10 days before his actual birthday

Anyway, I usually start these birthday (and half birthday) posts with a little update of the boys’ vital statistics. So Gabe is now 96 cm tall, meaning he’s grown 4 cm in the last 6 months, and he weighs 2 st 1 lb so has only put a pound on – he’s still not quite as skinny as Toby though! He’s now wearing 3-4 clothes apart from a few 2-3 t-shirts that still fit, and has size 7 feet. He’s pretty average for a three year old I think, not like Toby who has always been super tall. He’s got a lot more hair in the last year too, but still nowhere near Toby levels!

Gabe and his makeshift birthday cake

Even though he’s not put much weight on I’m happy he still eats a reasonably balanced diet. The only fruit he will eat are apples, bananas and melon but he still likes most vegetables and they are often the first thing he will eat on a plate. He’s not a huge meat fan unless it’s processed and even then needs a lot of encouragement, and he doesn’t really like potatoes but will eat pasta and rice. And he’s not a big fan of sandwiches but will eat bread and butter! He still loves chocolate, cake and crisps but we try to keep everything in moderation.

There have been quite a lot of other changes for Gabe in the six months since his last update – I mentioned then that he was sleeping better but still had a dummy when he woke up in the night. Well, he now sleeps through the majority of the time (and even slept really well on holiday too) and we stopped giving him his dummy completely not long after I wrote that last update. A couple of months ago we finally got round to getting bunk beds for the boys and he moved out of his cot without any trouble at all really.

Me and my Gabey

The other big news is that Gabe has also toilet trained in the last month. Toilet training was quite a struggle with Toby and he wasn’t out of nappies until he was about three and a quarter. If you’d have asked me six weeks ago I would have said Gabe was going to be the same – we had introduced a potty probably six months ago but he just wasn’t really interested. He would occasionally sit on it but rarely did anything, and he was happy to sit in a wet nappy, and would probably have done all day if you let him.

We’d been trying to encourage him to use the potty at nappy changes and bedtime with little success and then one day about a week before we went on holiday he decided he wanted to wear big boy pants. Not ideal timing but we decided we needed to seize the opportunity and go for it. The first day he had three accidents and a couple of wees on the potty. The next day we were going out for most of the day so I put him back in a nappy, and the day after that he went back into pants and has hardly had an accident since! I did put him in a nappy on the plane when we went away just in case, but actually he didn’t need and kept it dry.

He’s even managed to crack the notoriously difficult transition to pooing in the toilet too. I think the first couple of times he did it in his pants but after that he’s been fine. Although he does have a tendency to say ‘I’ve done poo’ when actually he means he needs one but it has prompted a few worried dashes to the toilet. Speaking of toilets, he is actually using the toilet more than the potty, although at the moment we’ve still got a potty in the living room because it’s quicker than going up or downstairs to the bathroom.

Gabe is still wearing a nappy at night for the moment too – although actually it’s dry in the morning most of the time, and even when it’s not it’s because he is trying to stay in bed until the sun comes up on his Groclock rather than getting up for a wee. I think that will probably change once Toby is back at school and they are getting up a bit earlier. To be honest though, as long as Gabe is happy to keep wearing a nappy in bed I’m not going to stop him. Because we use cloth nappies it’s not as if one is getting wasted if he doesn’t wet it, and if he does then a wet nappy is much easier to deal with than a wet bed.

Gabe the crackpot

Other than the practical things then, Gabe has changed quite a lot in the last year too. I think the change from two to three is a really big one – he has gone from speaking in short sentences to being a full on chatterbox. He knows so much, which I think is partly to do with having an older brother and partly because of how much TV he watches! He still loves Team Umizoomi but thankfully our holiday seems to have broken the obsession a little bit and he’s not asking to watch it every hour of the day any more.

He loves playing on his ‘tiny telly’ at the moment – the boys had their tablets a lot on holiday because we didn’t take many toys and there were times it was so hot we just needed something to occupy them inside for a bit. Both of them are a bit obsessed with them at the moment though – I’m hoping going back to school and nursery next week will give them the time away from them to realise they don’t need them all the time.

One boy and his daddy

And speaking of nursery that brings us back to where I started. It’s almost time for me to go and get Gabe from his second settling in session. He was crying when I went back to get him at his first session so I’m hoping today has gone a bit better. He can be very shy in new situations so it will probably take a while for him to really get used to his new surroundings but hopefully he hasn’t been too upset. From next week he’ll be going to nursery for three full days a week, which will be a bit of a change for him from his two mornings and one (school hours) day that he was doing at preschool. I’m pretty confident he’s going to love it once he gets settled in, especially when he’s there all day, going out for walks and playing outside a lot of the time. There’s so much for them to do at this new nursery that I don’t think he’ll have time to be sad.

So there we are, my little Gabey is three years old, and in another year he’ll have just turned four and be about to start school! Where on earth does the time go??

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