1- I love these sweet boys. David is always (and has always been) wonderful. But the other day I was thinking about how he's really picked things up to the next level. He's kind, patient, and loving. He works incredibly hard, and although busy season technically is over - he still has some heavy projects he's trying to push through at work. But even though he's still putting in a lot of hours and energy at work, he still gives us 100% at home. I'm amazed by him every day and can't say enough how lucky we are to have him. He knows how to make each one of us feel special and loved and we are blessed by that.
2-I've taken a HUGE step back with Red Ladder Design because I've found that if I take on too much it gets incredibly stressful for me and my kids suffer for it. I have done a handful of wedding announcements over the past few months and I'm glad to say that I was able to keep things pretty balanced. I just finished up my last set of wedding announcements and I'm in love with them. Look at these gorgeous envelopes!
3-We went to the farm with some friends and had such a nice time. It snowed last week (!?!) and had been a little rainy in the morning but the weather was perfect when we went and there were almost NO other people there. The peacock had splayed his feathers all out, which the kids loved, and we rode the horses 4 times in a row. Austin really wanted to ride the horses, but then got nervous and didn't want to ride the first time, but then he decided to try it and after that I couldn't get him off! He really loved it.
4- On Tuesday Caleb just would not nurse. He'd cry and cry and so I'd rock him until he fell asleep thinking that he'd nurse when he woke up and wasn't so tired - but then he wouldn't nurse again and would just fall back asleep. Finally after about 7 hours of him sleeping and/or not nursing - I held my crying baby in my lap while I pumped about 3 oz of milk for him. Pumping is hard for me and I'm not usually very successful at it so I was grateful I was able to get some milk for him. I started feeding him and he took the bottle right away. It was a stressful thing for me, but it was SO sweet because Lydia asked if she could feed him and she sat and fed him the whole thing. By that night he was nursing fine again, so I'm not sure what the deal was... but look how sweet these kids are.
5-I hadn't mopped my floor since Caleb was born. (Over 2 months.) Don't judge. Spot cleaning was getting us through, but I finally decided to bite the bullet and do it. At our house, mopping is a family affair. :)
6-These boys are cute. It won't be too long before Caleb starts catching up to Austin in size! (Also, we're hoping to potty train Austin this summer. He's definitely interested and probably ready but I've been putting it off.)
6-My cousin, Trey Knowles, is getting married tomorrow and my Grandma and Grandpa Knowles were in town from Boise for the wedding. We had them over for dinner and to hang out tonight and it was such a nice time. I love my Grandparents so much and am so glad it worked out that we could spend so much time with them. I'm glad that even though they live far away, my kids are growing up knowing and loving them, too.
So it's finally happened, my Thanksgiving Point pass expired this week and I'm not going to renew it. I feel good about the decision, because there are just so many other fun things to do around here that it makes sense to take a year off and not spend the money, but I'm still a little sad.
I knew the pass was expiring, so we tried to use it a lot. I said that we were going to go every single day of the last week, but we really only ended up going a couple of times. I didn't get pictures of the Children's Museum when we went - but I got some cute ones at the farm. It was really Austin's first time going and walking around and knowing what was going on and he loved it. That alone makes me sad not to be renewing, because I'd forgotten how much I love going there and walking around with the kids. But then Austin wanted to go one way and Lydia got upset and ran a different way and I thought that maybe not dealing with that didn't sound so bad after all. But it really was a beautiful day. Just cold enough for jackets. Puddles everywhere for Lydia to jump in to her heart's content. Austin wanted to hold my finger everywhere we went, only letting go to grab Lydia's hand. This is one of those beautiful days in a mother's life.
The day that my pass actually expired, I decided to try to hit all of the spots with the kids. We started at the Dinosaur Museum, then walked over to the water tower and got ice cream and fries. The kids were in heaven. Then we went to the farm and walked around for a little bit. The weather was actually pretty cold, so we didn't stay long - but we were there long enough to have a nice time. I was planning to go to the Children's museum afterward, but I asked Lydia if she wanted to go there next and she said that she just wanted to go home. I asked her a couple of other times on the way home, but we had already had such a nice time and if she was happy - I was happy.
Lydia's a little concerned about the fact that I don't have a pass anymore, but she's decided that it's okay because we can "still go to museums that don't need a pass". (We call a lot of things, museums.) So, it's sad to say goodbye to Thanksgiving Point for a while, but I'm excited to go explore other things. The end.
22 Months old. That is SO much closer to 2 than 18 months was.
It's amazing what just a couple of months can do for a girl.
Stats: She's still in 18 month clothes, for the most part. The shirt above is 24 months and it's a little big - but a few of her other 18 month things are starting to get a little small. Size 5 shoes. (The only shoes she's had for the last month or so are her brown boots - but Aunt Jenna gave us some darling little maroon flats and we've loved having another pair of shoes that fit.) She wears size three diapers during the day and size four at night, but this is mostly because we still have a lot of size three diapers left and she can still squeeze into them. As soon as we run out of size threes, she'll be in size four day and night. Her hair is really filling in, it's getting long and curly on the sides and is even growing some on the top. She still only has 8 teeth, four on top and four on bottom, but in the last week two more just broke through (on the left side of her mouth, one on top and one on bottom). Still no molars, though.
Some things from this month:
--I often give her snacks in little bowls/cups to carry around. (We are talking like one inch deep and an inch and a half wide - not large at all.) She does this funny thing where if she drops one thing out of the cup, she'll say "Oh no!" and then dump out the rest of the cup. I'm not sure what goes through her head but it appears to be "Oh no, I dropped one - what about the rest of them? I better dump them out, too."
-She has learned what it means to be "silly" and she likes being silly all of the time. This involves putting things on her head and laughing about it, copying what you are doing and laughing about it, jumping around and laughing about it. It's a really fun stage. She was eating some ham for dinner and she thought it was so funny when she put it on her head and made us laugh.
-She's getting to where she likes to color with crayons and markers. It's been really good for our Family Home Evenings because it's easier to help involve her in the lesson when we can draw pictures while we talk about things. On the Monday after Valentines Day we had a FHE on "Love" where we drew pictures of all of the things that we love and talked about how much Heavenly Father loves us. Then we frosted heart cookies. I felt pretty awesome about that.
--She really loves watching Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. When we went to visit Jenna, Lydia loved that the TV was so close to the ground. We don't let her watch Netflix on our iPad very often but she kept walking up to the TV and touching the icon for Daniel Tiger trying to get it to play. Funny girl. I love Daniel Tiger because it's so appropriate for what these little preschool kids are going through (going to the doctor, what to do while you wait, what if you get scared?) Also, I can't help but include this darling picture of Lydia and Camille. They are going to be great friends! I know it.
--She LOVES ice. It's so funny. She loves to suck on it, play with it, and eat it. She'll ask for it in her sippy cup (even though she can't play with it - she likes that it's in there) and is in heaven if she sees it in someone else's drink and can convince them to give her a piece. We went to Costa Vida and got her a cup full of pellet ice and she loved it!
-Lydia has learned the concept of "mine". Everything is "my this" or "my that". It makes me laugh because she gets this stern look on her face and pulls whatever she is talking about close to her side (almost like she's putting it behind her back). One morning as I was watching her play, she suddenly got this upset look on her face. She then scolded her stuffed dog and said "MY book", while pulling a book away that was sitting relatively close to him. I had to laugh - but i'm a tiny bit worried about our "sharing" future. (Up to this point, she's been pretty happy to share most everything with her friends.)
--Lydia loves all of her family members. She's lucky to be surrounded by so many people that love her. Aunt Amy came down a couple of days to play with us. Melissa and Blake have been over several times. We've gotten to see both sets of Grandma and Grandpas. She loves them all!
-On that same note, we Skype with my parents fairly often. Lydia loves to talk to them on the iPad. She giggles and runs around and tries to stick her face right up next to theirs. She also frequently brings me the ipad saying "papa? papa?" (grandpa) because she loves talking to them so much.
--She discovered this cute little hat and loves to wear it around. I think that it's darling and I love that she likes it. One morning Carson brought over his Woody cowboy hat and Lydia went and found a hat for her and Elsie and they wore them around all morning.
-She's really good at building with blocks. She still only makes towers one block wide but can get them really tall (15 blocks isn't unusual). Often David will come home and there will be 3-4 towers standing in random places around the room: on the coffee table, on the floor, on the entertainment center. It's cute that she leaves her little landmarks all over the place.
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--I don't have a great picture of this (even the "main picture" at the top of the post has a headband because the bow clip was broken and I just used a safety pin), but Lydia has started letting me clip bows into her hair. It's getting kind of long and scraggly (especially right after she wakes up in the morning, which I'm realizing is the majority of photos in this post) and I keep thinking that maybe I'll trim it up. But then I spray it with a water bottle and scrunch the ends and her hair curls into these darling little baby curls in the back. When I sweep the front of her hair to the side and clip a little bow there, it looks so darling! I can't even believe how darling she looks. So we are holding off on the haircut for a while, because those little curls melt my heart.
--She's starting to say more and more words and combining them into sentences. She can repeat any word back to you, and can say most words on her own. I should have taken a video of all of her words, because it's hard to explain how cute her little voice is when she says "elephant" or "pepperoni" or "happy". Most of her sentences start with "I want". Like "I want an orange" or "I want to go outside". Or even the more recent "I want to fall" - which she says if we are holding her on the couch or something and she's squirming and we tell her that she's going to fall and she needs to be careful. That one always makes us laugh. She has started saying things like "Elsie coming to play" or "Elsie go see the bunnies". (She really likes Carson and Elsie and talks about them by name even when they aren't around.)
-She has so much energy and loves to run around. I love to watch her climb and run - it makes my heart happy to see her personality and energy come out. She's just always SO happy. Very rarely does she get upset about nothing, and even when she bumps her head - she usually gets over it pretty quickly. I can't believe how blessed I am to have such a happy, energetic, sweet little girl.
--Last, but certainly not least - Lydia's very favorite thing from this past month is definitely "the bunnies". I finally caved and bought a Thanksgiving Point membership, and I don't know why I waited so long. We went every day the first week that we got the pass, and probably go at least 3-4 times a week every week since then. It's just so nice that it's free so we can go for just a half hour on our way to/from the store and it's SO close that whenever we get into the car and Lydia says "Go to the bunnies???" I can hardly every say no! There just isn't a good reason not to go. It's a great place for her to run around, and she loves the animals. I should clarify - when we first started going, the bunnies were the first thing that you saw when you came into the building but they have since moved to their home outside. (She still runs to the bunny area as soon as we walk through the front door.) The bunnies are NOT her favorite animal at the farm - it's just the way that she expresses that she wants to go to the farm. The goats are actually her favorite, followed by the horses and the cows.
-Often times, she'll run far ahead of me and bounce around from animal to animal. The goats, then the horses, then the ducks, then the other horses, then back to the middle. Most of the pictures I got of her were of her back - because well... that's mostly what I see when we go to the farm. As I was getting ready to put this post together, I realized that I hadn't taken a single photo at the farm yet. Everytime we go, we just have so much fun that I've forgotten to take out the camera. So we went today and I got a couple of pictures and I even got a few videos. The first video is of how excited Lydia gets when we are walking up to the building and how she runs straight to the bunnies. The second video was just meant to show how she loves the animals (especially the goats) and how she basically runs through the whole thing - but unexpectedly we encountered a loose chicken! That part of the video makes me laugh SO much. The video ends with her running away from the chicken saying "Scary!" I can't even think about it without laughing. Then the last video is at home when she was telling David about what we did that day - and when he asks about the chicken she tells him it was scary. So funny! It really is so cute though, that when he asks her about her day - she can tell him what we did (usually involving going to the farm.)
(As interpretation, she says "see the cows" then "the ducks" before she starts repeating David. And listen for how she says bunnies - I love how it sounds like "bobbies".)
I know that I say it all the time, but I love this little girl more than I could have ever imagined. Honestly, I have loved this age/stage so much that I'm a little sad that she is determined to keep getting older. But, I'm so grateful to be her mama and can't wait for the many adventures to come. We love you our darling Lydia Elise. You make us happier than we ever knew was possible.
