Just a little update today on this cute guy who will be 3.5 at the end of the month…

For starters, he’s growing like a weed. If you can’t tell in the picture above, pretty much all of his pants are high waters now! I’m just trying to get us through the winter and into shorts weather!

Maxwell is just on fire these days – the things that come out of his mouth amaze me and make me laugh.  His imagination is ridiculous right now, too.  He’s always talking about his fire station down in Florida and all of the neat things it has.  Pretty much anything we talk about, he’s got it at his fire station – an elephant, another baby named Maxwell, race cars, you name it – he’s got it!  Plus, all week we’ve been getting ready for his “big band concert” and he keeps asking me to check the fridge to make sure we’ve got the ingredients for the brownies to take to the concert.  His ingredients?  carrots and lettuce.  ha!  He also carries around his cell phone (my old flip phone) a lot and receives calls quite often, usually from GJ, about a “big emergency” somewhere.  It cracks me up to hear him carry on these one sided conversations.

A few of his favorite things right now…

Books – Little Blue Truck (he can recite every word) and Little Blue Truck Leads the Way.  We still read 5 (!) books every night before bed and he’s pretty good about always picking different ones so we keep a variety.

TV Shows – we’re on a bit of a tv kick right now thanks to the cold winter days. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Doc McStuffins are still great but now he also looooves Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Handy Manny, and his newest obsession, Paw Patrol!  His favorite on Paw Patrol is Marshall the fire dog, naturally.

Movies – Toy Story (all of them but I think 2 is his favorite).

Toys – He still loves anything to do with firetrucks and “fighter fighters”.  Any kind of truck is still his top choice of toy but he’s also really into his stuffed animals (especially his elephants) right now, especially during nap time when he loves to make his bed into an ark!  He’ll really play with anything but there’s not one particular toy outside of his trucks that he plays with  more than the others.  He’s juuuust now started talking about superheroes so we’ll see were that goes!

Favorite color – orange. No question there.

Favorite foods – Eating is not his strong suit!  As always, we’re working on it.  His favorite foods are yogurt, bread (pancakes, waffles, cinnamon bread, you name it), black bean cheese burritos from Moe’s, cheese quesadillas and refried beans from the Mexaurant, applesauce, any type of squeeze packet (especially the orange banana ones), almond butter and peanut butter, any type of chip and any type of dessert!  Still won’t touch a fruit or a vegetable no matter how hard I try.  I offer them all the time and he just says “No, thank you.”  Hey, at least he’s polite!

He has his best buddies at school – James and Lila – and my favorite part of the week is picking him up from school and listening to him talk the whole way home in the car.  He’s full of information!

Like all toddlers, he has his moments but, aside from being a little sassy and talking back now and then, we rarely have any issues. He basically never has to go to time out or get any sort of punishment.  He’s still on a big time Momma kick and really wants me to do everything for him.  He loves Dad but really only lets him do anything for him when I’m not around.  🙂

The best part about Maxwell these days are the things that come out of his mouth.  Just a few of my recent favorites:

“Momma, trust me on this.”  
“This CANNOT be happening!” – apparently Woody says this.
“You got it chief!”
I was asking him about a set of twin boys in his class and he said, “Mom, they aren’t brovers, they’re twins!”
And all the time I hear “When I grow up, when I’m 5…” – Let me tell you, lots of things are going to happen when he’s 5 apparently!

Every day he has “quiet time” in his room from around 1:30 to 3:30.  Some days he falls asleep, some days he just plays.  But, he’s pretty good about staying in there until his clock turns green.  At night, I always rock him after Robert reads books.  We have a very specific set of songs we sing too – several Christmas carols (yes, still), zipadeedoodaa and then Twinkle.  We get him in bed somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00 and he wakes up around 7:00am every day.  He wakes up in the middle of the night more often than I’d like.  He’ll wake up and just be crying hysterically while basically still half asleep.  I go in there and get him calmed back down pretty quickly usually and he’ll go right back to sleep.

His little brain is just on overdrive.  He’s learning to write letters (he’s got J down!) and, thanks to his LeapFrog DVDs, is learning what certain letters sound like and always asking me to spell words.  Pretty neat!

To me, this kid is just magical and special and I’m so incredibly grateful that he’s mine!  Yay for 3.5!