Happy Birthday Grant

 
We won't dwell on the fact that by the time Mikey turned three years-old he had two younger siblings.  Now my youngest child is three! Believe me, we do not expect the same behavior out of our youngest three year-old as we did with our oldest three year-old. Regardless, we are absolutely in love with Grant, but there are a lot of reasons to be.
I love the imagination that Grant has. He can play for hours, making up the story of what is being played. His playing is usually filled with intense adventure, fighting bad guys, swimming away from sharks, and usually shooting something. He loves guns and will make any object be a pretend gun. He likes to show me the guns he found at the ends of his arms, his fingers. He can make up the most impressive stories and loves to have others join him.
Grant is a total jock. My other boys liked to play with balls, but weren't crazy about them. Not so with Grant. He LOVES LOVES LOVES playing any type of ball. He loves to throw things and tries to catch them. One of his favorite activities with me is just throwing a football back and forth across the living room then tackling me.
When he's upset he continues his love of throwing objects. He will throw anything in sight..but we have been working on it and he has improved. He also will punch first and ask later, he doesn't care that his brothers are twice his size (except William), when he gets upset he will throw a hard, mean punch. Most of the time the boys will be nice and not hit him back, but there have been a few times he has gotten beat up for his rash acts. Again, we are working on this behavior.
Grant can be incredibly stubborn. He use to refuse to say "Sorry". I gave him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he didn't know how to say it until one day he hit William with a toy. I asked him to tell William sorry, he refused. I stood him in a corner, but with only a limited amount of time before we had to leave, I took away his cherished Blankie until he said sorry. He made the mistake of telling me, "No…I NOT 'ay 'orry", for then I knew that he could say it. He ended up weening himself from his blankie by going 3 days without apologizing, proving to me that he no longer needed it. Grant really is not a difficult kid and I am not always disciplining him. In fact, once I fight him on an issues, such as saying sorry or obeying me, and I win (after several hours of him siting in his room….he really is stubborn) he is very good at following through with my requests. Now he is very good at apologizing.
Grant is a Daddy's boy….because they both have blue eyes. True, that is what he tells me. It is quite ridiculous.
And even though he claims to be a Daddy's Boy, he really is a true Mommy's Boy. He has to always be around me (not that I mind), and I always have to "come at" him. He substitutes with and by for "at". He loves to sit by me and will get very upset if any of his brothers take his "place" by me.
One thing I love about Grant is in the morning he loves to snuggle in bed. I almost hate the mornings that I go exercise because I love to lay in bed and snuggle with him for 20 minutes. But on those mornings, he comes and snuggles with me while I read the scriptures.

Grant has great self control. Since being potty trained at 22 months, he has had very few accidents, and if ever he did have an accident it was because of a failure on my part. Also, after hearing the dentist tell him that sucking his thumb was hurting his teeth, he had quit sucking his thumb in three days. At night, when he's asleep he will unconsciously suck his thumb and there are moments when he is having a tough time, he will go lay on his bed and suck his thumb for 20 minutes.
He loves Joey, our dog. He is very sensitive to him, even though he can also be quite rough with him. He will lay with his head on Joey and just cuddle with him.
Grant has three nicknames, one of which that we do not call him to his face. The first one, that he knows about is "Homie". This stems from Grants ever occurring request of "ho' me" (hold me). Todd still gives into this request all the time, I'm about 50/50. I usually tell him that I will hold his hand instead.
His second, and most commonly used nickname was given to him by William. It is "Granty-Pooh". I have to say that there isn't many things cuter than hearing your little 4 year-old lovingly call to his brother with his own nickname.
Grant's unknown nickname is "Ball Mac". This stems from the time that Grant was petting Joey's tummy and noticed something. He asked me what it was and I informed him that it was Joey's ball sack. Grant replied with "ball mac!" You can only imagine the celebration when while going to the bathroom Grant discovered that he had a "ball mac" as well.
We find that we let Grant have his way a lot. Part of it is because he's the youngest, part of it is because he is just too dang cute.
Grant is such a joy in our lives. I'm so glad that he came to our family.
Here's what we did for his birthday:
Started out with the traditional bath in the exact place he was born three years prior. It's really quite interesting that out of all my kids (who all enjoy taking baths), Grant enjoys the bath the most.

We had our birthday breakfast with the whipped cream and candle on top of our food. On everyone else's birthday, everyone gets a turn to blow the candle out on their own food, mostly because Grant insists on doing it. But then on his birthday he acted as though the candle wasn't even there.
We went swimming where Grant had swimming lessons. Unfortunately for Grant, this particular day was "Safety Day". This day the teacher gets the life jackets out and they learn about safety and do different things like swimming. Grant refused to wear the life jacket and cried the entire time. It wasn't until at the end when they were jumping off of the diving board that Grant finally joined his class. I felt so badly, Grant usually loves his swimming class, but sometimes he gets upset about something and will not calm down for quite some time.
After swimming we had lunch in the commons area of the rec center. Our friends joined us and we had cupcakes to celebrate Grant.

Then we went to the park, where Grant got to do what he loves the most, swing, and I didn't even give him a time limit. Maybe that's why he fell asleep.

It was good he got some rest, for after Todd got off work, we went to the local minor league baseball game. Grant was in heaven and watched the game with no problems.
We had cake, a train cake that I had made. Each boy got a train car and Todd and I got the left overs.
Grant opened up his gifts and what did he love the most? His bat. He really is a jock.
Happy Birthday Granty-pooh, so glad you are with us.