Happy Birthday Zoey!!!

Here is a late post of all the birthday happenings of our Zo-Zo. She is now 3 years old. Let’s see… stats first:

She had her doctor’s appointment and is in great health! She is in the 5th percentile in both height and weight, though. So, we are supposed to fatten her up a bit. Height: 34.5 inches and Weight: 27 pounds. Other than that, she is doing fabulously!

Zoey also had her first dentist appointment yesterday. She has 20 teeth and "they look great!", says Dr. Fidler. Zoey was introduced to Mr. Tickle (the brush that polishes teeth), Mr. Squirty (the thing that squirts out water), and Mr. Thirsty (the thing that sucks up the water). She did awesome in her first dental appointment. She was very calm and patient and didn’t get scared or anything! She got all of her teeth polished up and flossed and painted with some flouride.

Last week we also continued our path into Zoey’s speech. Back in August, we had an evaluation done at the Seattle Hearing, Speech, and Deafness Center, and they claimed that she needed some speech therapy. They recommended we go to Wonderland, an infant-age 3 center for speech therapy in Shoreline (closer to home), only Wonderland didn’t agree with how the score was considered and Zoey did not qualify. They told us to have her retested (for free) with the Shoreline School District when she turned three. We set up an appointment for last week and they tested her hearing, vision, speech, fine, and gross motor skills. Zoey has started talking a lot more in the past several months, and has improved so much that she did fine on the language test. She is right on target for her age. In fact, she passed all the tests except for Gross Motor Skills. They want to do a full evaluation on her Gross Motor Skills in about a month or so.

In our opinion, she is just overly cautious. For example, they had her step onto a step-stool that was about 3 inches tall and she insisted on putting her hands on it for balance. Evan and I are not worried at all. She does great in the Little Gym and romps around jumping on all the furniture at home.

Speaking of the Little Gym, we had Zoey’s 3rd birthday party there on Sunday in between all these snow days. Most of the kids invited made it. Zoey had the greatest time!!! They ran around and played with the parachute, played hide and seek, and just explored. She got some great gifts, too! She is still wearing the princess nightgown with matching slippers from Auntie Bonnie—going on day three now. We will be peeling it off of her soon.

After playing, cake, and presents at the Little Gym, we headed over to Mad Pizza for dinner. Pizza is one of her two favorite foods. The other favorite food is "rice and beans," which pretty much means rice. Her favorite theme is princesses. Her favorite color is pink. And one of her all-time favorite games to play is Ring Around the Rosie with all her little people in a circle and she is the ring master ("Joe") telling everyone what to do and is the singer. Her favorite TV shows currently are: Handy Manny (cartoon about a Hispanic 20 something guy with a box of tools that help him fix stuff for people), Little Einsteins (cartoon about 4 kids on missions), Sesame Street, and Big, Big World (about a sloth creature named Snook and they learn about animals and music and lots of other animals). I think those are the top. Daddy ends up being the voices all the time when we are doing other things like driving in the car or reading stories at bedtime.

Happy Birthday Zo! We love you!