Spring is here!

Finally the snow is melting! It has been gorgeous the past few days, today too but it's a little windy and this was early in the day, so we decided to keep the hat on.

Ages and stages: 20 Months!

Hello my little darling! You are now 20 months old and looking very toddlerish these days. I don't think there is any baby fat left on that cute little body of yours. You are talking in sentences more and more now. Sometimes they are a bit jumbled or broken up but it is still so amazing to hear you make this more advanced kind of communication. You have always been so much fun to play with but the jump in communication skills just makes it more fun!

Lately you have been loving to read your Cinderella book and talk about her, the mean stepmother and little mice (which is always followed by a hehehe). We sometimes watch videos of the songs on youtube and you love that. You have a little wand that you will carry around , saying "bibbidi bobbidi boo" and you also have a dress we call your Cinderella dress that you love to wear. You also love Mr. Noodle from Elmo's world and will talk about him quite regularly too.

Your songs of choice lately have been some we sing at library time; "open, shut them" and "sticky sticky bubble gum" but you still sing your old favorites "twinkle, twinkle" and "rock a bye baby". Speaking of, you have been all about babies lately. Your dolls are one of your absolute favorite things to play with now (not your tea party set anymore), and anytime we see a baby you have to go over and try to hug it. Thankfully, the moms at story time are very accommodating. This is perfect since your new baby cousin Nila is due any day now! :)

You like to play with your farm set, and town blocks quite a bit still. You like your puzzles too but I'm afraid you might grow out of them soon, they are just a piece of cake for you now. You were loving bath time until about two weeks ago when all of a sudden you started refusing it. We are pretty confused about it, maybe it will be the topic of a future post. You like to play this adorable "night, night....wake up!" game with me and daddy and any number of your babies or stuffed animals. You still looooove books and we read them all the time!

We have seen a few little tantrums, which breaks my heart. Mostly they have happened when you were really tired and hungry for one of them. I just feel bad not being able to rationalize with you for somethings. You love to run around the stores now and have been refusing to sit in the cart so I've generally been avoiding them as much as possible. Also you have been waking up in the middle of the night for like two hours at a tine again. Gah! Those nights are hard, but when this happened a while ago it passed so hopefully it will again soon! All in all though we are having a blast most days! Especially with the weather starting to warm up. I am so looking forward to all the fun we are going to have this summer!!

I LOVE THIS AGE!

Can I just say how much I LOVE this age :) Not that I didn't love all the months up til now but this age is just so fun. So much PLAY, so many HUGS, so many "thank you, mommy"s and "I love mommy"s and "mommy and daddy and Kylie and mommy and daddy and Kylie and mommy are family". GAH! THE BEST!

Also can I just say how sad it makes me that it all is going by so fast! SLOW DOWN!

And now for a darling picture taken on Easter:

Everything Easter!

At some point I will be able to write a post with some substance again, but today I only have time to post a couple more Easter crafts and baby girls Easter goodies :)

Easter crafts:

Wooden Easter Eggs I painted filled with stickers to find on Easter morning: 

Goodies for the Easter Basket:

And the finished product: 

I tend to obsess over stuff like (I blame it on my mom who always gave us perfectly put together things for the holidays), but I absolutely LOVE the way it turned out and I can't wait for Easter morning now!!!

A Simple Easter Craft

Nothing too fancy, but the start to our Easter/Spring crafts, hopefully there will be more to come! I just cut out some egg shapes out of paper and then we just had 'decorating' them. I do highly recommend the sponge brushes for stamping/painting in general, not just for this craft. My daughter is loving painting right now and she is also loving using these circular brushes. I have seen people use clothes pins stuck on pom poms which would work just as well probably but these were so cheap at Walmart I couldn't resist!

What My Baby Girl Wishes Were Toys

A while a go I wrote a post about my favorite toys. Well, ever since I read this splendid little article, I have been putting together in my mind a post about the non-toy items that my daughter has loved to play with as a baby/toddler so that I could always remember them.

The Nalgene bottle was her first obsession. She would love to move the handle back and forth and back and forth and explore the cover with her mouth. She wanted that bottle any time it was out. The second is a set of coasters at my mother-in-law's house. Once she was mobile and could pull her self up on the coffee table she discovered these delightful stacking circles. Her and her Memere would count and stack them. She loved them so much that Memere bought us a set for our house, and now of course she could care less about them! Ha, no I'm just kidding, she does still play with them once in a while and likes to tell us their colors but she isn't as interested as she first once was. Ugh the toilet a paper roll. Okay first of all I DETEST this ugly holder more than anything. When we bought this house (two weeks before baby girl was born I will remind you), I wanted to bring these to the dump as fast as possible, but it just never happened and after the baby came, I gave up on trying to find an alternative toilet paper roll dispenser because I had more important things to worry about, obviously. To this day, my daughter loves to play with the toilet paper roll and the holder. The same thing was in our other bathroom too but that one was really rusty so it did at least make it into our basement and is still awaiting the day I remember to bring it out with the trash. And the kicker is, every single time I bring baby girl downstairs to switch out the laundry she runs over to it and plays with it. Every time.

Now that she is older, baby girl loves to play with things that are small and can be put in and out of containers. She loves to get all the straws out of the box and then put them back in. In and out in and out. She also loves to rip paper off of crayons and stand on books or anything that could be a step (the more dangerous the better in her eyes I think).

Ages and Stages: 19 months

Well my little darling, you are now nineteen months old. I waited until today to write this up since we had a well-check up yesterday and I could include your official stats ;). You are now a whopping 19.38lbs ha ha. But you are definitely getting longer. The nurse measured you at 32 inches which also means that you have finally started to grow out of the 12 month pants and fit into 18 month pants! Your head circumference continues to hold strong on the top half of the charts at 87%. You have been nursing less this month (well, with a brief increase during the flu), and for the past week it has only been 3 or 4 four times a day, and last night was only once during the night, wahoo! (I'm sure tonight will be like 3 times since I said that). You have been eating well lately, with no major changes from last month except that in an attempt to get you to drink more cows milk I have been putting it in your little tea cups and you will try and drink it from there. It seems to make it more interesting but it is also quite messy!

Now on to more important things, you are still our little chatter box and can easily say multiple word phrases. In fact, you like to randomly spout out a few lines from Hop on Pop once in a while. "Dad is sad. Bery, bery sad. Had bad day. What day Dad had." and yesterday you told me "Rosita is on the bike" while looking at our "Elmo's Potty" book. Of course, it is not perfectly enunciated, but I mean no one expects that at this age. You love to point out stop signs where ever we go and are starting to point out relationships. You love to talk about "big" and "little" things when appropriate and if there are three animals or maybe even a set of three inanimate objects you will refer to them as "mommy, daddy, and baby" whatever they are. You will pretend nurse you baby dolls and pretend feed any of your stuffed animals, or adults or yourself. One of your favorite things to do (and has been for a few months actually) is to play tea parties in your house.

You had your first flu about a week ago and we watched quite a bit of T.V. for a few days. I think your favorite was Cindrella (we have the book too and you had been interested in that for a while) you love the mice and will say "Cinderella, mice, hehehehehe". You have also been talking a lot about "Mr. Noodle" from Elmo's world lately and it's so adorably funny! We have been getting many books out of the library lately, you love to read! We got a "literacy to go kit" about colors and you really liked the books inside that; "Lemons are Not Red" and "Pinkalicious".  You have really been enjoying the Sandra Boynton books too when we get them. But really you like pretty much any book that it's hard to say if you have "favorites". It's funny though if there is something that you don't like in a book you will say "no" to the picture (or something on T.V. , etc.). That has a been a favorite word around here lately, but I'd like to do a whole other post on that. Thankfully you have also been saying "pank you" so that has been a very pleasing surprise. You really are our sweet girl!