Giuliana is THREE!! Here's her 3 year update...
Giuliana’s 3 Year Growth Stats:
Height: 35.8inches (10-25th %ile)
Weight: 25.6 pounds (5th
%ile)
BMI: 14.06 (5th %ile)
Dan likes to say that Giuliana is all legs and hair, and she really is! She
has long skinny legs and a full head of hair with curls that stretch down to
her butt when her hair is straightened or wet. She still fits in some 12 month
clothes if that gives you any idea as to how tiny she really is.Dan is so smitten with Giuliana. And, with Giuliana’s love of cats, I think it led Dan to recently come up with the analogy that Giuliana is sort of like a “cat”. His rationale was “She doesn’t come when you call her name. She is perfectly content doing her own thing, and being by herself. She comes to you when she needs love, cuddles, snuggles and food. Sometimes she likes to sleep with you, and sometimes she doesn’t. Her food patterns are predictable. If you make her mad, she’ll scratch. Etcetera.” Pretty funny analogy, actually.
FAVORITE TV SHOWS: Dora The Explorer, Batman, Go Diego, Go!", "My Little Pony"
FAVORITE COLOR: Purple
COMFORT ITEMS: Purple blankey & purple monkey. Like Rocco, Giuliana is VERY attached to her blanket. When she was a baby, every time I would nurse her, I would wrap her in her purple blanket and she would hold it and rub the soft blanket against her cheeks and face while nursing. I’d swaddle her in the purple blanket too at naps and bedtime. So, it is just a part of Giuliana! She has 4 different purple blankets, one being “THE purple blankey”. Purple blankey goes to bed with her, wakes up with her, gets dragged throughout the house all day long wherever she goes. It goes to the potty chair with her, it goes on car rides, it eats breakfast and lunch and dinner with her. You get it… her “puwple blankey” is her everything! Purple monkey is her new obsession. She asked Santa for ONE thing, and one thing only – “a puwple monkey”. Santa delivered and Giuliana was SO HAPPY when she opened that present. Purple monkey now sleeps with Giuliana every night and also is becoming an important part of her daily activities.
FAVORITE FOODS: Peanut Butter (lately, she requests 1-2 PB&J sandwiches daily), eggs, berries, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, breakfast sausage, waffles, pancakes, corn dogs, french fries, salmon, peas, mashed potatoes, cheddar cheese, pasta and avocados. Giuliana will not eat if she’s not hungry. And, if she’s hungry, watch out – she will surprise everyone by eating everything on her plate. I call her my buffet girl… because she likes to eat whatever she sees. She will have a plate of food sitting in front of her, and then if Gabby, Rocco and I are all eating something different for lunch, she will ask to have some of what all of us are eating. Also, she’ll often times end up on my lap during dinner, eating off of my plate. She likes a buffet of food – not just 1-3 items on her plate.
ACTIVITIES: Gymnastics! Giuliana LOVES “nastics” and looks forward to every class. Since she just turned three, she was able to begin a new class without parent participation. She jumped right into the new class with the bigger kids with NO hesitation. She loves gymnastics so much, and just really wants to do it all and be a big kid just like her big brother and sister.
FAVORITE SAYINGS: “You’re my bestest friend in the WHOOOOOOLE WORLD!”, “Mommy, I love you ALL DAY LONG!”, “You’ve GOT to be KIDDING me!” (picked this up from her dad when he gets frustrated, so she uses it when she’s frustrated! Ha!), “Tooty Fruity”, “Tooty Booty” (while shaking her booty at you)
FAVORITE BOOKS: “Wolf’s Coming”, “I Love You All Day Long”, “But I WAAAAANT It”, and so many others. I’ve never known a child to love books as much as Giuliana. If you don’t know where Giuliana is, you will most often find her sitting on her bed, the sofa, or by the bookshelf, wrapped in her purple blankey with her nose buried in a book. She LOVES to look at books and can do it for hours all by herself. Sometimes, I have to convince her to actually let me read her a story. She’ll often say “No, I reading it!” Lately though, she is trending towards more often than not allowing me to read to her.
FAVORITE TOYS and INDOOR PLAY: Lately, she is really into playing with miniature LaLaL.oopsy figurines, miniature My Little P.ony figurines, miniature L.ittlest Pet Shop figurines, and also some little dinosaur figurines. She lines them up, and carries them everywhere with her…the car, to bed, to the dinner table, to the potty chair, you name it. (And, I absolutely LOVE it when we’re in a hurry to go somewhere and Giuliana is refusing to get out the door because she can’t carry out her 15 figures.) She also loves anything Batman and her pink & silver Batman cape still being a staple in her make-believe super-hero play with Rocco. Other consistent favorites are puzzles, Play D.oh, coloring with markers, sticker activities, making food in her play kitchen, B.arbies with Gabby and sometimes even taking care of baby dolls. But, one of her most favorite indoor activities is to read books.
FRIENDS: Her best friends are truly Gabby, and Rocco. She also loves playing with and is completely entertained by her little brother, Marco. For the past year, if you’d ask her who her best friend was, she would have told you “Misia” (our au pair from Poland who was with us from Sep 2011-Sep 2012). She still sometimes names Misia as her best friend, but with time, that is beginning to pass (as would be expected for a 2-3 yr old). If you ask Giuliana who her friends are lately, she’ll say “LexiCallie”. Lexi and Callie are her two cousins from Texas who visited us this past summer, and clearly left an impression on her memory. She also has neighborhood friends, by default of being Gabby and Rocco’s younger sibling. And I guess she basically thinks that any friend of Gabby’s is a friend of hers as well!
SLEEP: Giuliana is a great little sleeper! She goes to bed between 8-8:30pm and usually wakes up anywhere between 7:30-9am. She sleeps in her own big girl bed, in her own bedroom. And, she is loving that Gabby is sleeping with her in the queen bed in that room. She has fully transitioned from doing one nap a day to no naps. Most of the time, this works out fine and she can handle it. But, every other week, there will be a day where the no-nap catches up with her and we’ll find her to fall asleep in the car or with a book in her lap on the sofa.
FAVORITE MOVIES: Little M.ermaid, T.angled (Rapunzel), Batman
FAVORITE VACATION SPOT: Disneyland
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS THIS PAST YEAR:
1.
Transitioning from diapers to pull-ups.
2.
Potty in the potty chair.
3.
Pooping in the potty chair.
4.
Dressing herself.
5.
Counting to 20.
6.
Sitting on the big kid swing, and swinging without
falling off (we still push her)
7.
Pedal a tricycle.
8.
Climbing up onto the bar stools, and getting down by
herself.
9.
Vocabulary has increased extensively. Her diction is
getting better too.
10. Transitioned
from sleeping in a crib, to a toddler bed, to a big girl bed (ALL in the SAME
YEAR!)
11. Became
a big sister!
MATTEO: Giuliana is very aware that she has another older brother who died. Whenever she sees the moon, she says “I see Matteo!” She also knows/understands that Matteo’s death and not being present in our homes, is a sad thing. I know this because sometimes she’ll come up to me and say “Matteo die… that so sad”, while tilting her head ever so slightly and squinting her eyes. Giuliana never met Matteo, because she was born on his birthday, just over 6 months after Matteo died. We tell Giuliana that Matteo kissed her in Heaven before he sent her down to us, and that explains the little red lips shaped birthmark she was born with on her right hand.
Giuliana is such a great kid – I just LOVE everything about her. She is perfectly content playing by herself and reading stories, but is thrilled when Rocco and Gabby include her in their play/activities. She will often come up and say “Mommy, can you snuggle me?” or “Mommy, can you hooooold me?” (and that’s when my heart melts; I sometimes need the reminder that she is still so young too, and I need to give her more cuddles when I’m not busy with Marco). She has been influenced by her big brother to think that everything related to the butt or poopy, is supposed to be funny. So, she often time ends sentences with “booty” or “poopy” if she is trying to be silly or make someone laugh.
Giuliana is often the reason for one of the tiny pieces in Gabby or Rocco’s L.EGO sets missing. She is also often the protective little sister, wanting to stick up for her big brother or sister when they’re getting scolded, by saying “Stop being mean to Gabby! (or Rocco!)” Giuliana also quickly picked up on how to distract Marco from playing with one of her toys, by handing him a different toy and gently saying “no, no, no!” while shaking her head with a sweet smile.
One of the biggest transitions in Giuliana’s life this past year has been potty training. She has been poopy trained since May of 2012, and will always go poop in the potty chair. She will yell “I’M MAKING POOOOOPY!!” from the bathroom, which is really pretty funny. She is much lazier with going potty. She’ll go on the potty chair when you put her there, or encourage her to go. But, she rarely initiates going to the potty chair on her own. We’re working on this daily.
She picks up very quickly on things her older siblings do or say. For instance, Gabby comes home singing things like “Jingle Bells, B.atman smells, Robyn layed an egg…” and the next thing you know, Giuliana is singing it constantly. Or, Gabby came home from school one day saying “Eeeeny, meeeny, miny mo, catch a tiger by a toe, if he hollers let him go, eeeeny, meeeny, miny mo!” Then, Giuliana was saying it over and over for the next several weeks. She also picked up what a “pinky swear” was from some other little friends, and when she tried it out on me I was surprised and had to laugh, as it brought me back to my childhood instantly.
Giuliana is truly an angel in our lives. She arrived on one of the most difficult days in my life and has been an absolute blessing and wonderful distraction from overwhelming grief and sadness. She is gentle as a soft breeze, as sweet as sugar, and determined beyond belief. You could not be more special to us…we truly love you to the moon and back, Giuliana! xoxo
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