Brianna had three costumes to choose from this year. She was such a good sport to try them all on and let me take pictures before she chose one. First she tried on her Dorothy costume, complete with ruby slippers:
I am pretty sure I never saw this look on Dorothy’s face…
Next she tried on the clown costume:
On cue, she did a pouty face to make a “sad clown”.
She later added the glasses, which made it perfect!
Last, she tried on Tinkerbell, complete fancy shoes:
Her absolute favorite thing of them all, is those ruby slippers. She wanted to wear them with everything! After much deliberation, she settled on the clown costume with the ruby slippers and the sunglasses. Stay tuned for the pictures from Halloween!
Lately, Brianna is fascinated by all things pumpkin. She loves all the jack-o-lanterns popping up on the neighbors’ front porches, all the pumpkin patches we regularly drive by, and all the inflated pumpkins she sees out and about, especially the giant pumpkin at the farm down the street. Tonight, in fact, was the first night she wanted to go back to watching Cars this entire month – she had been requesting “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” So, when I heard the farmer’s market was going to be having a pumpkin decorating contest, it was a no brainer to take her. In all honesty, she had little to no interest in the decorated pumpkins, but she LOVED all the rest!
Posing with her buddy – Count Pumpkula
She was so excited to be able to get close enough to touch one of the other inflated pumpkins.
These are big pumpkins, Mommy!
I think she had a good time…
I have a few recent photos that don’t really fit into any particular event or activity, so I am just going to lump them all in a miscellaneous post.
The other night, she decided to “prepare” applesauce for both Jason and I. As you can see, this activity “required” my yellow dish washing gloves. Oh, and while her eyes may look blue in this picture, she assures me they are brown when she is being the mommy!
I didn’t move quickly enough to capture on video the story she was telling while playing with this card. Take my word for it – it was pretty cute!
One morning we spent quite a bit of time just playing in the bathroom…playing with Mommy’s shoes…
…and mimicking the kitties. Poor Pooh Bear couldn’t get in there for anything!
A lot of time recently has also been spent playing with some loaners from Ms. Jean, including a Tinkerbell costume (she LOVES playing with the shoes)
and musical jewelry boxes full of toy bracelets and necklaces.
As Brianna keeps telling us almost every day: I growing so fast! It is amazing to look back at pictures that I would swear were taken just yesterday and see how she has changed. She is now 34.5″ tall and weighs 28-30 lbs (depends on the day and time of day – she likes to play with the scale lately). Her hair is so long now – it is definitely “relatively” longer than mine (meaning it goes farther down her back than mine does), and I think it just might actually be longer than mine. If it is not, it is sure getting close. As she will tell you, she mostly likes to keep it long, but will let us put a little braid or a hair bow in to keep it out of her eyes. We also try to make sure it is always back in a pony tail during meals to keep it as clean as possible. She talks up a storm these days and comes up with the strangest reasons for doing/not doing things. If she does not want to say hello, good bye, or night night, she will excuse it by saying “when I’m taller” – if you pick her up to make her taller, she will generally comply. If you ask her why she did/did not do something (e.g., why didn’t you eat your crackers? why don’t you want to dance?), her reason is generally “It’s not nice” (not really sure just yet how to explain what “it’s not nice” really means!). She still sleeps great at home, although we now generally have to snuggle with her in the rocking chair or rub her back for two minutes before we leave, and we now need to turn on her stars at night (she has a turtle that projects blue and/or green stars onto the ceiling). Her imagination is starting to affect her sleep a little bit – she has woken up a few times in the last couple of weeks (once shrieking for us in a panic). When we get there, she calms down pretty quickly, and tells us the dog in the window (apparently that means outside her crib) scared her. I think the harvest moon made some funny shadows in her room and she didn’t like it. We shall see how it goes at the next full moon. Potty training is going slowly – for the most part she is not interested. Although just today, she started marching off to the potty the minute I had her diaper off, before I could even ask her. Perhaps we have reached a turning point? I think if she hasn’t accomplished this on her own by then, we will use Thanksgiving weekend to lose the diapers (at least during the day). She is still fascinated by Cars, loves silly bands, and loves shoes that make noise and/or light up. All in all, she is a typical toddler!
Right now she is all about the pumpkins and FUN Halloween stuff, but you can keep the skeletons and other scary monsters. Here she is with her new battery-operated jack-o-lantern and her pumpkin sunglasses.
I bought the jack-o-lantern at Target last week, and she pretty much carried it with her everywhere for the next several days. The last couple of days she switched to my stuffed jack-o-lantern – probably because it is softer, easier to carry, and I will let her take it in her crib with her at night (the lit one seemed like a bad idea in light of recent night time awakenings!).
This past weekend we took her to a corn maze and let her participate in all the associated activities. She had a great time – I will need to take her back as we just did not allot enough time for her to feel like she got to do everything. We started with the corn maze.
Helping Daddy hold the maze flag:
Posing in the picture boards:
Ready to go (thinking intently about which way to go)!
Wrong turn…
The corn maze was fun, but she got bored with that pretty quickly. She much preferred the nearby playground, farm equipment, and bouncy house.
The big tractors were scary, but this one is just my size!
What does that do, Daddy?
We had a great day in the beautiful fall weather. Good thing too, since the evening was definitely ruined by the AWFUL game.
