06 December 2013

Brrrrr! It's cold outside!

We decorated our house last weekend. Earliest we've ever gotten our stuff together.

Amelia helped us put lights and ornaments on our little fake 3 ft tree.

She loved it and kept saying "treeeeeee!""

Every day we try and do some little activity to spend time together and enjoy the holiday spirit. I put together a little list of advent type activities. Mostly it includes drinking hot chocolate, listening to Christmas music or coloring. But it's nice to come home and have a list of something entertaining to do to keep us busy in the evenings.

We hope you are enjoying the holiday spirit and staying warm! It's barely been over freezing today! We even got a tiny amount of snow!

 

03 December 2013

Fall

With the days getting shorter we tried to enjoy as much time outside as possible this fall. We played at the park, in the alleyway with neighbors, cleaned up the garden and went for walks.

But now that it's dark before 5pm, it's a little tricky to keep Amelia entertained in the evenings. So I've been trying to keep her occupied with crafts and other silly baby-toddler things. Like collecting leaves and gluing them on paper.

That was entertaining for about 5 minutes. So we quickly moved on to crayons, coloring and making cards.

So far we've tried to do something crafty or at least attempt purposeful play each night.

Now that it's December we are trying to do our own mini advent activities each night. It's a little tricky with a 1.5 yr old, but we'll figure it out.

 

02 December 2013

18 months

Height 2' 6.6" 13% <----- shortie!!

Weight 22lb 11.5oz 51%

Head 18.11" 44%

Okay, the girl is almost 19 months, but whatever.

As soon as 18 months arrived she's been a full-blown toddler. Terrorizing mom and dad.

Running, jumping, squealing, giggling, dancing, stomping.

Lots of "NO's!!!!"

"Ready. Set. Goooo's!"

She's picky. And bossy. And very determined.

She throws a mean slow-mo tantrum. Slowly lowering herself to the floor, as not to hurt herself.

It's a handful, but also pretty hilarious.

So all that makes her sound real terrible. But she's not. She's still sweet and loves to cuddle and gives us occasional kisses.

For a couple of weeks she was obsessed with books. We could read them for a solid hour, which is real long in toddlerhood. But now she's a little too bossy to let mamma read and turn the pages. So we read for 5 seconds instead. Fun.

Again, we are still convinced that she's brilliant. The words are flowing out of her mouth. Besides being big on "no" she also is getting better at asking for things. She says "more" in the sweetest little high pitched voice, "mo, mo, mo, mo." Also, "up up up up" It's totally precious. It's like she knows if she turns on the sugary sweet voice she'll get what she wants. And she does.

Other little things that nobody else really cares about, except for mamma:

  • She mostly drinks out of a real cup now. This is good and bad.
  • Still loves her blankey (one day she cried while it was in the washer)
  • She's totally figured out "eyes" "ears" "nose" and "mouth" and often points them out on us.
  • Her friend taught her how to do "knuckles" and she picked it up on the first try.
  • Her favorite color is "blue" although she calls every color "blue" but we're working on it.
  • She's starting to finally make animal noises and point out animals in books. It's taken forever for this to stick. I've been working on pointing at a cow for a solid 6 months....but she'll point to a balloon on the first try.
  • She still likes to clean and throw away our trash. It's awesome.