Lydia Elise: 19-20 Months

This little girl is 20 months old! She's happy, energetic, adventurous, and so darn cute. 

Stats: Absolutely grown out of every 12 month piece of clothing that she has and a few of her 18 month clothes are starting to get a little tight. The outfit above is actually 24 months - but it's the only one that she has right now. You can tell it's a little big - but it's not SO huge. She's still in size 3 diapers and wears size 4 and 5 shoes. I don't know how much she weighs - but she is definitely starting to get heavy. She is finally breaking through another tooth (she's had the four on top and four on bottom for months now with no sign of any other teeth). It's on the top next to her already-in teeth. No molars yet. Her hair is FINALLY long enough to put in pigtails. She is absolutely darling and we love her.

Some things that we want to remember about this month:

--We went to the Alpine Live Nativity on her 19 month birthday. She loved to see all of the animals, but her favorite were the sheep. She was pretty good at making the animal noises we asked her to ("What does the cow say?" -- "Moooooo"), but after a while she responded to every animal with "Baaaa".

--She loves Bees. I don't know exactly where she learned it - but she will point out each and every bee in every book we read. (There are a surprising amount of bees just hanging out in the illustrations of books that are not about bees. Sitting on flowers, flying through the air...) I'll be reading about Curly the Pig and all the sudden she's pointing and saying "Beee". It's really darling.

--She also loves Lions. Everytime she sees a lion she says "Raaarrr". (We have several books with lions in them and she loves them). We often play "little lions" and crawl around on the floor growling at each other. She makes the sweetest little lion.

--Jumps on the trampoline and loves it.

--So many new words! Some of her favorites are book, read, tiger, Elsie, tree, Y (we point out the letters when spelling her name and she loves saying "Wyyyyyy"), baby, Grandpa (papa), water (wawa), milk, cereal (cera), treat, up, down, upstairs, downstairs, outside, coat, mommy, daddy, bear, fox, potty, poop, pee, orange (peach), tower, ball, and many many others.

--Loves both of her grandpas. We spent a lot of time with family over this last month and Lydia was always asking about Grandpa. Whether we were at home, at a grandparents house, or in the car - her most common word was "Grandpa?" Once, she even brought me the ipad to Facetime with my parents (we had just finishing talking to them a bit before - but when she came up holding the ipad saying "papa, papa" I couldn't resist and called them back). She's lucky to have such great grandpas. (She loved playing foosball with my dad over Christmas.

--She loves her babies! My mom gave her twin babies (one that looks like Elsie and one that looks like Lydia) and David's mom gave her a little baby as well. She loves all three of them and often tries to carry all three of them around at the same time. She is such a good little caretaker - she feeds them and helps them drink and loves to have them with her. 

--When she sees the camera she says "cheese!" The first time I heard her - I was so surprised. But I think her Aunt Amy says "Say Cheese." Regardless, it's so cute. 

--She had a great Christmas. She liked to climb on the boxes, but if you could catch her attention she loved to pull off the paper. She was also so in love with all her toys and frequently wanted to stop and play with what she had just opened. She sure is a loved little girl! 

 

--She is showing all sorts of interest in potty training. She acknowledges when she has a poopy diaper, and will even lay down (occasionally) if you ask her if she wants to get her diaper changed. She says "potty" all the time and sits on it almost every night. 

--She idolizes her dad. She points at his coat and shoes when he's gone and says "dad". When she hears the garage go up when he's coming home, she giggles and runs to the door. And when he watches football, she joins right in. 

--Pigtails! I've attempted to do a little ponytail on the very top of her head a couple of times over her little life and never had any success. Finally, I realized that there was more hair in the back than on the top and put her hair in little pigtails and it. is. so. cute. The first time I ever made it happen - there were many tears shed. But it's gotten progressively easier. (I really wanted a good picture of her piggies, but she was still mad at me for messing with her hair and these were the best I got.) 

--She's so athletic and energetic. She climbs all over our couches, side tables, coffee table, and chaise. People frequently ask me if she falls down and gets bruises all the time because of how active she is - but she really doesn't. She's really coordinated, and has an excellent sense of balance. Some of the things she does make me a little nervous - but she's actually very capable. She rarely falls down, and even though I stay really close to her when she's being a daredevil, she almost never needs my help to do what she wants to do (like balance beam her way from one side of the sink to the other, or scale the couch and reach her little body to the side table and pull herself over). She can even pull herself up on the coffee table with no assistance from anything. She basically does a pull-up and then gets her leg over the edge. The one thing that I'm really trying to teach her is that she cant go off of things head-first. She likes to slide to the very end of the chaise and use her hands to walk herself off. The other day she started going head-first off the side. I'm really working on it - but everytime I stop her she looks at me like "Mom, I got this!" I don't know what I'm going to do with her. 

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-- She loves oranges but calls them "peach". It's so funny. She'll go to the fridge and ask you to open it (usually with whining but sometimes she'll point and just look really cute), then point to the fruit drawer and say "peach?". Family members know that the way to her heart is by bribing her with little clementines, but she likes the big oranges as well (although she is very impatient while you peel it). 

--She loves Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. She'll often point to the TV and say "Tiger", or she'll find the Wii remote and bring it to me. She really, really loves him. We try to limit TV, but this month we were a little lax (there was just so much going on). We love it because it's cute and teaches good morals. She loves it because it's so fun. 

--One day while I was making dinner, I was letting her watch an episode of Daniel Tiger. They were playing with a ball and the little song was "Keep trying, you'll get better." I looked over and she had found her ball and was bringing it to me to throw with her. So we threw it back and forth for a minute. Then a little later in the same episode - Daniel and O the Owl were trying to build a tower and I watched her pull out her blocks and start to build a tower with them. It was the neatest thing! It makes me glad that we have her watch good educational shows instead of just junk - because she's obviously soaking it all in. 

--She loves to build towers. One day when we had the trampoline upstairs, she started building her tower on the tramp. She was being very careful and holding very still while stacking her tower, but when she finished it - she would start bouncing on her knees to knock it over. I was so impressed with her problem solving ability! 

-- She has lots of cute outfits, but one of my favorites was the orange shirt and purple pants outfit pictured many times here. These were not all taken on the same day. I just must have thought that she looked cute every day that she wore them and always taken pictures on those days. Silly. 

--She found David's gloves and tried to put them on all by herself. She's so smart.

We sure love this girl and are grateful for the happiness that she brings to our lives!