Almost 3

Eston will turn three in less than one month, on November 19. He has mastered pottying at his school, doing so well with it that he spent some time in the 3-year-old room (no diapers allowed there) last week at school. At home however, he will not go near a toilet for his own restroom needs, yet LOVES flushing for us. He runs across the house just for the chance to flush for us. He has a plan that he'll potty at home when he's three. He says he's going to wear a diaper to his birthday party and then after his friends leave, he'll switch to underwear from then on. We don't really mind diapers and have not been in a rush, but I'll be glad when he achieves this milestone.

Baseball is his current hobby of choice. Eston is happy practicing his hitting for very long stretches at a time. He is quite observant of the players on television because he insists that he wear a hard helmet for batting and that we players in the field (pitcher, outfielder, catcher) wear baseball hats. He originally wore his football helmet for batting since that was his only hard helmet, but we recently acquired a proper baseball helmet. He likes to wear it all the time (just after a bath (see photo), riding in the car, shopping, visiting friends). When he's ready to play, he gathers all of our appropriate gloves and headwear and herds us outside for baseball. He mimics other behaviors of the pros too, such as removing his helmet,wiping his pretend sweat from his forehead with his upper arm, and putting his helmet back on for the next pitch.

School is going very well. As his verbal abilities increase, he often surprises us with knowledge he's acquired without our involvement. For example, last weekend while visiting Bibi Croom and Grandpa Sandy, he "read" the entire "Are you my mother?" book by P.D. Eastman, complete with choreography. We didn't know he'd ever seen that book, yet he has the entire thing memorized. Here is another recent picture of Eston I snapped when I arrived at school for pickup and found him reading with his friends.

At home, in addition to baseball, he enjoys a web-based learning program called ABC Mouse that Mimi (my mom) discovered. By listening to storybooks, doing puzzles, and playing educational games, Eston earns tickets he can use to go shopping for his electronic fish tank (which actually grows algae that you can scrub off) and his electronic hamster cage (for which you can buy more cages, tunnels, and hamsters). We've been trying to control ourselves from shopping too often on the site because we want to collect 100 tickets to get another hamster cage with a wheel. He used to need help navigating the site, but this evening when I was distracted talking to Randy, Eston went shopping and bought one of the more expensive new hamsters (wiping out 50 of the 72 tickets we'd collected toward the cage). It was so surprising and hilarious that he did that on his own. We will continue trying for the cage. Electronic hamsters and fish are so much easier than real ones (never any hamster droppings or dead fish to clean up), and for our little guy Eston, they seem sufficiently entertaining and an appropriate level of responsibility for now.

While it's easy to report sports and school activities to you all, our biggest priority is simply for him to be a nice guy. Hopefully our encouragement to make eye contact, smile, and talk to people will help him down a path to this goal.