A few of my favorite things

Lily is in the middle of a stage where she's working rigorously to figure things out but is often slightly off in the cutest ways. Some examples...

• She calls her sunglasses "eyes"
• When she wants the cell phone, she says "Hi! Hi! Hi!"
• Every evening, Lily and her teacher take a walk around the building and play "I spy". They mostly look for colors and sometimes shapes. Lily has taken to the phrase "I...spy....purple!" She often repeats this phrase at completely random times, but it comes out as "I...purple!"
• She has made up her own phrase "uppy shuppy". It is her signature phrase, as she repeats it constantly, but it doesn't seem to mean anything in particular.
• She says "up" when she wants to be picked up...and when she wants to be put down.

You know that it's Spring when...

The baby birds have arrived. (Their nest is in the bush right under our kitchen window.)

My azalea is blooming!

May Day

Almost 18 months!

Lily continues to play mom, and it's so amusing to me. She washes my arms when I'm giving her a bath; she points to the pictures in her books and asks me "What's this?", just like I do when reading to her; and of course, she covers me with the blanket and says "shh"to put me to sleep. Adorable. This really is a fun time to be a mom. My sister, Suzanne, and I were talking about her daughter's upcoming birthday (one already!), and as she said, "The first birthday party is really more for the parents - we made it, everyone survived - whew!" I imagine this is even more true with two. But the truth is that the first year is hard - amazing in its own right but still hard. There are still challenges with Lily's age, but it's not the same for many reasons. Probably the main difference is that we are all on a schedule, and Lily sleeping from 8:00 pm - 7:00 am on a regular basis helps immensely. The rewards seem to increase as well. Rolling over, sitting up, and crawling are all huge milestones, but there is nothing like watching her figure out the world. The most wonderful development to date is her increasing language skills. There is no doubt that parents and babies have a communication system from day one, but it is awesome to actually be able to talk with her and have her understand. We are just at the beginning of the language adventure, but I am loving it so far. With increased understanding however, she will be subjected to Carl's jokes, poor girl. Today Lily requested her juice cup while she was riding her little bike, and Carl said "no" because he is opposed to drinking and driving. He actually told her that and so matter-of-factly. Again, poor girl. Below are some pictures of my little girl working hard at being a big girl.

Dinner on the deck

Sitting at the table like a big girl

...On second thought, daddy's lap looks like a much better dining spot.

Lily's latest

Lily continues to rapidly expand her vocabulary, parroting a lot of what we say. Her latest favorites are "shocked", "jacket", "sit", "nice", "milk", and "poo poo". She started saying "poo poo" after she would do the deed about a week and a half ago. Not long after, she started saying it before she went - a surprising development. I figured that we had better follow her lead on this, so we bought our first potty chair today. We are by no means in the process of actually potty training, but we have started the precursor stage by introducing the potty chair to her and familiarizing her with its purpose. I wasn't sure what she was going to think (if anything) about it, but she absolutely LOVES it. We spent over an hour in the bathroom with her just playing with it. She would sit on it, look into it, move it, put things in it...I was not aware of the potty chair's potential to totally captivate and amuse a toddler until this afternoon. Tonight, she again said "poo, poo", and I asked her if she wanted to go on the potty. A huge grin spread across her face as she ran to the bathroom, opened the door and sat down on the potty - all clothes still completely on. The biggest problem so far is getting her away from the potty; she would stay on it all night if I let her! So, this was not something that I anticipated we would be involved with so soon, but so it goes with Lily. She is on her own time line, and we just try to keep up!

" May I help you?"

Catching up on some reading

Gettin' comfortable

*The funniest thing was that she actually went to get a book from the family room completely on her own so that she could read it on the potty. Too funny.*

Our little helper

Helping fold laundry while watching movies in her pj's

(Does anyone recognize the movie on the tv? Anyone? Anyone?)

Helping with the painting

Helping with the gardening

We had an extremely productive weekend, clearly due to Lily's contributions. What would we do without her help?