Third Christmas

We are now very close to celebrating Hayden's third Christmas...and birthday. We have had an amazing year, and looking back at earlier posts reminds us how quickly kids develop. Haydens vocab has increased 100fold and there is not much that he doesn't pick up on so we now have to be careful with what we say around him. He can be a real chatterbox, and Kim is now wondering why she ever encouraged him to start talking. She has learnt how to overwhelm him with her own conversations though - it worked in our favour the other night when I had trouble getting him to sleep. Kim called while he was still carrying on so I put Hayden on the phone to her. After a bit of conversation Hayden told her that he just wanted a little lie down and two minutes later he was asleep!
Hayden still loves watching the rubbish truck come down the street although I don't think he is quite as obsessive as he used to be. Despite saying that - he still wants to run down alongside it to watch it pick up all the bins in the street.
He is OBSESSED with machines. Diggers, dump trucks, rollers, excavators, asphalt spreaders - his mum can just about name them all now. If he is playing in the backyard and hears anythig fire up (even a lawn mower) then he wants to know what it is and 'can we go and look at it." It works for and against us at times. If we drive past roadworks he wants to stop and look, and go back past it on the way home. If we need to entertain him then it is easy to jump in the car and drive up to the ring road site to watch all the machines at work. The problem is when you want to leave!
Now that he has grown a bit more we have taken the training wheels and peddles off the bike to try to get him riding it by himself. Just needs to grow another centimetre and he'll be right.
Hayden is now sleeping in the top bunk (& sometimes the bottom), which is great for us as it means that it is harder for him to climb out of bed, and not as much fun for jumping on! It also means that if we have a wet bed (Hayden is out of nappies at night) we can just swap him onto the other bed. We are having more dry nights than wet, and if he is wet it is mostly first thing in the morning anyway.
He has had his first visit to the dentist earlier this month, where he got to sit in the chair (on dad's lap) and the dentist counted all his teeth (all 20 present and accounted for).
We have also stopped having day times nap as it was becoming a major battle - and if he slept it would be for too long which made getting him down at night a problem. He has random day time sleeps here and there for catch up - three and a half hours today!