18 Months... WHAT!

The day before yesterday, this little lady turned 1 1/2!

She is a special joy in our lives and I could fill multiple books with the photos we take of her on a daily basis.

Her smile lights up the room and she is such a social girl that you are her automatic friend, holding whatever she wants you to and sharing your food within seconds... Because that's the way we roll.

She has a great sense of humor, although Dadee doesn't always get her jokes (they may be more of the Thompson brand at this point- blowing raspberries on your arm and laughing, etc) ((No offense to any Thompson's- I am one))

She loves music and it appears that she came to us this way.  She likes to dance, with our without music- it doesn't matter.  She also likes to sing and will often tell me to turn off the radio in the car so that we can sing the birdie song (In the leafy treetops), the grandpa song (It's always fun when Grandpa comes), the Dadee song (I'm so glad when Daddy comes home), the opcon song (Popcorn Popping), CD (ABC's) or moe, moe (The more we get together).

She has started to count and most bath times include a counting session of the ordinal numbers from 1 to 8.  Once Scott or I says "one", she says "two" and then we copy her all the way to "eight".  She doesn't say that they are the ordinal numbers on her own yet, but give Scott a little time and it'll be there.  (Wink)

She loves, loves, loves the swing.  I literally can not emphasise that enough.  On a Saturday, we can be outside with her in the swing all morning; playing, watching the birdies, clouds, trees and bugs, laying her head back, kicking her feet, and anything else that she can think of.  Then after lunch and her nap, she is back to asking about the swing.  The other day we were driving around town during rush hour- painfully slow... And she was getting to the end of her rope.  I saw a park (and so did she "pawk, pawk") and so we stopped and went on the swing for 10 min.  When I stopped pushing her and the swing stopped moving, she was ready to get back in the car and drive home.

She is very curious.  She is always finding new things to get into, play with and do.  She loves things that we use, so she plays with her medicine syringe and the bottle that used to have Vitamin D drops in it and an empty lip gloss container (she may have eaten some of the lip gloss before it got to the empty stage).  She also plays with remotes (we have recently purchased a new one because one broke from being bitten), tissues (she thinks it is entertaining and enormously hilarious to rip them up and eat them), lamps, the piano, stairs and chairs.  She also is curious about words.  We got our nails done at a salon for Grandma's birthday in August and the lady told her that her nails were beautiful.  When we got home and Dadee said that she had pretty nails, she said "No Pwetty!  Bweutifuw (Beautiful)!!"  She adds words to her repertoire all the time and loves to string her own words into the mix to make "complete" sentences... Although no one else may understand them.  She does string together two and three words now to get us to understand her.

She loves shoes and would wear every pair she could find if she could... and gets very upset when she can't.  I sometimes hide shoes once they have been put on the floor- which is probably good anyways because I hide them by putting them away. lol

For those of you who have wondered about our potty training experience, we are still not "potty training" but more "potty playing".  When she wants to sit on the potty, she does, with or without the diaper.  We also spend some time before bath where she gets to run around naked... This doesn't always work but she is noticing her body.  She often will tell me while she is pooping or directly afterwards, which I appreciate because I don't want her sitting in a poopy diaper and she gets used to the fact that we don't sit in poopy diapers. 

Her rocker in her room broke one night, so I replaced it with a shorter chair- then after the rocker was put back, she has been using the shorter chair to go into her room and grab and book and "read".  She loves books, but doesn't always wait for you to get through the whole thing before she is turning the page again.  She loves the rhyming ones the best.  She also loves the books that she can manipulate- the tabs that move things in the book.

This girl loves her blanket, which we started calling "fuzzy" and she called "fubby" so it has turned into her Fubby.  It has to be washed so often because she wants it everywhere with her.  She also loves stuffies and knows each of the animals and the sounds that they make... Although, I don't know how to make the giraffe or zebra sounds- so neither does she.  In our books, Zebra's say the same thing as horses. lol  If she gets to watch TV, it's "Bo on the Go" where Bo asks you to be different animals with her.  She loves to make the different sounds and actions from each of the animals in the TV show. 

When it comes to food, this girl is a fan of Cheerios, crackers, tuna, fruit- especially Raspberries, and Pickles- she could eat an entire jar!  She also loves "ice ceam" (Ice cream) which could mean ice and could mean ice cream.

Well, that's this little girl in the last eighteen months.  I sure love her and she has made my life so different.  I have learned so much from her thus far, and I know that I will learn more from her in the future. 

 

And the last little PS for today- Magdalen has been being babysat by a girl who was in our ward who had a child a few weeks older than M.  Sarah watched her for the last six months and M had such a great time with them.  Here is us saying goodbye as they packed up and moved up North.  These two kids really miss each other!