Our spunky baby of the family is now FOUR years old. So crazy! Abigail is packed full of personality in her tiny little body, and it’s getting hard to remember what our lives were like without her in it.
Abigail is currently weighing around 30 pounds, and I think she’s about 37 or 38 inches tall. She goes for her checkup in early September, so I’ll try to come back here and update with her official stats then. I’m pretty sure she is still tiny for her age, but I do think she’s grown some in the last few months. Update: On 9/2/21, Abigail weighed 29.5 pounds (10th percentile) and was 38 inches tall (15th percentile). My estimates were pretty close! A lot of her 3T shirts are getting pretty small on her, and some 4T stuff is fitting better. Shorts can be tricky, especially if they don’t have an elastic waistband ;) Abigail wears about a size 8 or 9 shoe depending on the brand. With her being the youngest child, I have been dressing her out of habit her whole life, and we recently discovered that she can get dressed pretty well without much help! Haha. I guess that’s how the baby of the family gets spoiled…you just keep doing things for them and forget that they could probably do them on their own. Anyway, we are trying to encourage her to get dressed on her own as much as possible now. She is extremely opinionated about what she wants to wear, and I have given up on fighting her about it every day but Sunday. I put my foot down when it’s time to get ready for church ;) Her hair has grown A LOT since last year!! She usually hates to wear a hairbow and doesn’t really like me to do anything to her hair at all. Her curls are still there but seem to be slowly going away, which is not surprising because the same thing happened to Brooklyn’s hair around this age. Abigail also knocked one of her front teeth loose a few months ago, so now she is sporting a gray baby tooth…haha. It hasn’t fallen out or needed to be pulled though, so that’s good at least.
I feel like I could just copy and paste my description from Abigail’s 3 year old blog post about her eating habits because nothing much has changed in the last year. She is STILL a difficult eater, at least when it comes to vegetables and most foods we eat for dinner. It’s hard to even pin down exactly what she’ll eat because it changes on a daily basis. It all depends on her mood, I think ;) She really likes cereal and sometimes will eat 2 or 3 bowls full to make up for the lack of dinner the night before. Her favorite cereals right now are Cheerio Oat Crunch and Special K. For lunch, she generally eats a PB&J or peanut butter and honey sandwich. She also likes chips, goldfish crackers, yogurt, cheese sticks, and most fruits.
Vegetables continue to be a problem, and cucumbers are still the only veggie that she actually likes. She hates most meats, especially chicken, and complains that she can’t swallow them. Usually she ends up chewing them up and just holding them in her mouth until she either finally forces it down or we let her spit it out. Sometimes she will eat foods like spaghetti or casserole, and other times she will leave it untouched on her plate. Basically, she is impossible to nail down. She does love pretty much all sweets, especially candy.
Abigail goes to bed around 8 PM every night and is generally a pretty good sleeper. She is, however, a very early riser. I actually have no idea what time she wakes up because her light is always on by the time I get up. I think it’s least 6:15 AM or earlier most days. We have finally gotten her pretty well trained to stay in her room and play quietly until others start waking up, although there are still days when her sisters get woken up by accident. Because she wakes up so early, she generally still needs an afternoon nap on most days. She doesn’t always fall asleep, but lately I’d say she is napping at least half of the time she lays down. The nice thing about Travis working from home is that I usually don’t have to wake her up to go pick up Brooklyn and Savannah from school. Right now, she likes to read a book, sing a song (usually “Old McDonald Had a Farm”) and say her memory verse before naps and bedtime. Sometimes we don’t have enough time to squeeze all that in, but she always asks. Anything to drag out the routine ;) She doesn’t have a favorite stuffed animal or blanket, and sometimes she will pick one to sleep with and other times she won’t sleep with any of them at all.
Abigail is pretty well potty trained at this point, but she still has accidents almost every week because she waits until the last minute to go. In her mind, there’s always something more important to do ;) Trying to get her to use the bathroom on our schedule though is a losing battle. “I tried and nothing came out” is her favorite refrain, even when we feel certain she could go if she really wanted to. We have also struggled for the last year with major constipation problems after she stopped wearing diapers. I don’t remember this happening with the other girls, but it has been really bad with Abigail. Dr. Dudley recommended giving her daily Miralax, which we did for a few weeks earlier in the summer and it helped tremendously (once we got the dose right). She was doing much better for a few weeks, but now we are right back to the same thing all over again. It’s been very frustrating. I hope eventually she will learn that holding it for so long only makes things worse, but so far the lesson hasn’t kicked in.
Abigail has gotten on a really big art kick lately and loves to draw, paint, and do crafts. She goes through SO much paper every day with all her artwork. She is starting to draw things that resemble people with faces and bodies. She has also recently learned how to draw hearts! I’m sure she gets her love of art from her big sisters, who are always drawing and coloring too. Abigail also loves riding her scooter, playing with stuffed animals, and dressing up. She asks all the time, “When can I play soccer?” because she watches Brooklyn and Savannah play and wishes she could too. She is also beyond ready to go to kindergarten and asks every week about that too. Anything that her big sisters do, she is very interested in doing.
Abigail is very spirited and strong willed and almost always thinks she knows best. Getting her to do something she doesn’t want to do can be very challenging sometimes. I don’t think she cries and screams quite as much as she did a year ago, but we definitely still deal with our fair share of temper tantrums. On the other hand, sometimes we only have to ask her once, and she will go and clean up her room all by herself without complaint. Those are the little glimpses that give me hope that we are on the right track…haha. The other thing that encouraged me recently was reading back over Brooklyn’s 4 year old blog post. I wrote some similar things about Brooklyn always thinking she was the boss at that age, and she has come a long way since then. So hopefully the same thing will happen with Abigail as she gets older.
Abigail loves being silly and making us laugh. She is still a big talker, and she is talking clearly enough that we can understand pretty much everything she says these days. She still speaks with a lisp when she says the “s” sound, and I tried to get her evaluated back in the spring for speech therapy with the school system, but they told me that she wouldn’t qualify if that was her only speech issue. It bothered me that they wouldn’t even evaluate her and listen to her talk to make sure there weren’t other issues, but these are crazy times with covid, and I’m sure they are overwhelmed right now. I have thought about having her evaluated by a private speech therapist, but haven’t pursued it yet. Maybe it will just correct itself as she grows, but I don’t want to wait too long and wish I hadn’t later.
Abigail can be very sweet when she wants to be and enjoys making pictures and artwork for others. She also likes to be my little helper, whether it’s feeding Gabby, putting clothes in the washing machine, or stirring food in the kitchen. She is pretty outgoing around most people but can be a little shy around adults she doesn’t know very well. She loves going to bible class as well as playing with other kids and especially her cousins. She is very bright and enjoys counting and telling me rhyming words. We haven’t worked with her on writing letters or numbers yet, but I have a feeling she’ll catch on quickly whenever that day comes. I think she’s learned a lot just by watching videos with Savannah during her virtual school days at home over the last year. Technically Abigail could start kindergarten next August, but she would be one of the very youngest in her grade. Her birthday is August 16th, and the cutoff is September 1st. School usually starts the first week of August, so she wouldn’t even quite be 5 years old yet if she started kindergarten next year! We are leaning heavily toward waiting an extra year for her to start kindergarten, but I guess we’ll decide for sure in the spring. I have no doubt that she has the personality to be assertive even if she’s the youngest in her class, but I think there would be other benefits in waiting an additional year. (Not to mention, I really want her to have a “normal” kindergarten year, and I’m not convinced that even next school year will be back to normal at the rate we’re going.).
Likes: looking at books, drawing, coloring, doing crafts, swimming, riding her scooter, playing “Lion King” with Brooklyn and Savannah, taking baths, and going to the pool
Dislikes: any kind of bug (she cries and screams if a bug gets near her, no matter what it is), loud things like the lawnmower and leaf blower, being told what to do or not do, being called a “little sister” or the “baby” of the family (she insists “I’m not a baby, and I’m NOT little!”), and sneak attack tickling from Daddy
We love you so much, Abigail!! We can’t wait to watch you grow over the next year!!
