Blog | 2010
That quarter of a year has brought some dramatic changes to my little angel. Here is a quick update – she changes every day!
Sleep: She still sleeps great at home (8-8 during the night and 1-4 during the afternoon), for which we are profoundly grateful! School is a little different, but she seems to handle it fine. Her current routine at night is to get all her toys in her bed (anywhere from 6-10 these days) plus one or two books. Then I have to go to the door and blow kisses, after which she asks me “I talk to you?” She then points to various things in her room while reciting their name – “there’s my clock, and my lamp, and my fan, and my fan, and my barn, and my books, and my toy.” Generally she finishes by either jumping up and down on her bed or laying down with her toys depending on how tired she is. It is soooooo cute!
Speech: Her speech is amazing! She easily and regularly speaks 5-10 word sentences. While I haven’t counted in a while, I’m guessing she has well over 150 words in her vocabulary, and that is probably a very conservative estimate. She started the “why” phase a couple of weeks ago, but only did it a couple of times and then dropped it. We will see whether or not that changes.
Memory: She is quick…when she wants to be (aren’t we all?). She now remembers where she last saw/last put things. She also regularly sings her favorite songs (“Happy Birthday,” “Baa, Baa, Blacksheep,” “On the Way to Grandpa’s House,” “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider”). We can generally still distract her from things we don’t want her to do or from whatever is making her unhappy, but it is getting harder. She can be very focused at times!
Activity: Some of her favorite things to do are playing play doh, taking care of her “babies” (including all Bla Blas, bears, and dolls), and taking care of her boys (she is quite pleased that all her boys moved up to the next class with her). She also loves to listen to all kinds of music – it truly varies from day to day. In fact, for about 2 months we had to sing pretty much everything to her to the tune of “Goodnight Ladies” – it was adorable, but I am a little glad she has forgotten about that for a bit! And, as with most two year olds, she rarely walks anywhere – she gets from point A to point B by running and jumping!
Attention Span: She is very good at playing by herself for a 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) and she can sit very still when something has her attention (Cars, some books, etc.). Just yesterday we went to watch an open rehearsal for the Brussels Chamber Orchestra. She sat perfectly still for the first 30 minutes, and only wiggled around a little for the next 30 minutes, until she declared “I ready to go”!
Food: This girl can EAT! While her favorites change from day to day, she will eat most things except lima beans, asparagus, and avocado. She recently has started refusing yellow squash, which was one of her previous favorites. Smoothies, particularly mango smoothies, are still her favorite.
Size: She is roughly 28 lbs. and as you may be able to see from the pictures above, she is roughly 34″ tall. Since she was 34″ at her two-year checkup, I suspect she is a taller than this, but it is difficult to get her to stand still by the giraffe (she thinks it is all a game!), much less do so with her feet together against the wall while standing up straight.
I am sure there is more, but I am drawing a blank right now.
To celebrate the 4th of July, Tatie Kat (my Aunt Kathy) came to visit. It was a beautiful weekend that really did not get hot until Monday. We mostly hung out around the house an played (painting anyone?). Sunday after Brianna’s nap, however, we decked her out in her patriotic finery and headed out to listen to the local bands and have a picnic to celebrate the 4th. Brianna had a GREAT time eating chicken and watermelon, listening to the music (local band and state symphony), and watching the geese.
Mmmmmmmmm…chicken
Watermelon!
and more watermelon…
and more…
Waiting for more music.
Went down to the lake to check out the geese.
We did not stay for the fireworks (too late, too loud, etc.), but I am sure we will some day in the not too distant future.
We closed out the weekend by repotting all our plants to give them more room to grow (with some luck, we may even get to find out what veggies we planted!), and watching School House Rock! with Brianna for the first time. As an added bonus, Tatie Kat made some more macaroni & cheese for me – individual servings I can store in the freezer. Yay!
This past week, my friend Marty was gracious enough to invite Brianna and I over for a playdate with William (2) and Julia (7 months). We had a WONDERFUL time painting, playing in the yard, trading toys, etc. Any Marty made us a super yummy lunch (quesadilla, guacamole, peaches, melon, mmmmmm). Unfortunately, I only remembered to take a couple of pictures at the very beginning. But here are they are – William and Brianna were having a great time painting, and they actually managed to get most of the paint on the paper!
This past weekend, Brianna’s Grandma & Grandpa came for a visit. Brianna is still a little shy when people come to visit, but I think all of the Grandparents would agree that she has been soooooo much better during each of their last visits (more social, more hugs and kisses, etc.). For this visit, Grandma and Grandpa brought my old toddler bed (made by my Dad and Grandpa when I was Brianna’s age) with them so we could paint it and get it ready for Brianna to use. I’ll post pictures of that once it is all cleaned up and freshly painted. My Dad also spent a goodly amount of the visit building banquette seating for us in our breakfast nook. It looks great! We still need to paint everything and put the cabinet doors on, but here is a quick picture just to give you an idea. When it is all done, I’ll post some before, during, and after shots.
I think Leia likes it, don’t you?
Grandpa may have worked a lot on the banquette, but he and Grandma also found lots of time to spend with Brianna. Here are a few shots from their visit.
In her new bumble bee dress (which matches her bumble bee rain boots!)…
Playing in the pool at my company’s picnic…
Lots and lots of play doh time…
Repeating her favorite word (no, no, no, no,…)…
Clowning around in her pretty dress..
We had a wonderful visit and now have lots of painting projects to tackle!
We recently had a rare visit from Nana & Poppa WITHOUT Tia! Not sure we have ever had one of those before. 
Brianna had a great time visiting with her Nana & Poppa, and I believe they had a great time having Brianna all to themselves (Brianna is extremely fond of her Tia…). While here, Nana & Poppa got to do “puddle” time with Brianna. We walked all the way down to her school so we could play in the big puddles. Brianna LOVES wearing her bumble bee boots and playing in the puddles…
Heading out to find some puddles.
After playing in the puddles, Brianna cooled off inside with some play time with Nana,
and story time (one of her favorite activities) with Nana & Poppa.
We closed out the visit with a baseball game.
There was a 2 hour rain delay so we didn’t get to see much of the game, but Brianna had a pretty good time anyway. I think she spent most of her time playing with Nana – I am not sure she even noticed there was no game to watch! Oh, and the fact that Daddy got a treat helped too…
We had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, and an even better Memorial Day. On Thursday before the weekend really got started, we headed to the local strawberry patch to pick strawberries one more time. Brianna was significantly less interested in picking this time (probably because they were harder to find), but she was still VERY interested in eating them…
We started the weekend having dinner with my friend Karen at our “walkable margaritas” restaurant. As an added bonus, there was a live concert in our neighborhood (the first summer concert of the season). The weather was very nice by then, so we hung out, listened to some jazz, and generally ran Brianna around to make sure she was good and ready for bed.
We spent most of Brianna’s sleeping times installing our new TV and associated electronics. Jason did a GREAT job not only getting the new TV set up in time for me to watch game 1 of the Stanley cup, but also getting all the wires hidden behind the walls and installing our network cable (read: he spent a lot of time in our crawl space – yuck!). It looks wonderful, and our new entertainment center was delivered today. So, tonight we will finish it all up – the house was a complete disaster for a few days, so I can’t wait to see how it looks when it is all done!
During Brianna’s awake times we did all kinds of things. The highlight, though, was another trip to the local museum on Memorial Day. I forgot my real camera, so I had to make do with my iPhone camera, which is not too good in low light, but you get the idea.
To Brianna’s right is a snapping turtle (he ducked his head and moved right before I took the picture…)
After running everywhere and exclaiming over everything, especially the sea horses and the fish, we went to the discovery area where kids are allowed to touch and play with everything. They have all kinds of things in there – fossils, costumes, books, puppets, some animals, etc. Brianna had a blast playing with the puppet fish with her Daddy!
They also had a snake height chart. As you can see in the second picture, Brianna is now in the range of a Northern Water snake (roughly 33″).
After her nap, we spent some time outside enjoying the cool weather. Brianna was fixated on her squirt bottle again. She went back and forth between squirting herself and squirting her Daddy!
Deep in thought over her squirt bottle…
gotta make sure we get Daddy right the first time!
It was all in good fun.
We were sad to see the weekend end, but we had a great time!
Mimi came to visit for almost two weeks – we had a wonderful time enjoying the weather and even enjoying the rain! I think I’ll let most of the pictures do the talking…
We went to Duke gardens on a beautiful spring day.
The new Japanese garden is open and is just lovely!
Of course, all that exercise made us hungry (but we stayed stylish with our hat)!
We played in the rain…
(will it ever stop?)
And splashed in the puddles…
and read books…
and painted…
and dressed up (I think the tu-tu/sunglasses/sleepsack could be the next fad, don’t you?)
Ta-da!
All worn out…
A wonderful visit!
Last week, Brianna and I went strawberry picking for the first time. She LOVES strawberries, and I thought she would enjoy picking them from the farm around the corner from our house. We had a great time, although I think Brianna is still more interested in eating the strawberries than picking them… Here are some photos from our adventure.
First pick
First sample (notice how clean she looks here…)
Ooooo, a big one!
All done picking! Here is Brianna’s take (she spent most of her time asking “eat more srawbeddies”?
Our combined take (we got 11 – 12 cups give or take).
She sampled about half a dozen while we picked – she looks pretty clean still, don’t you think? Ah, but the best was still to come…
After we paid for our loot, we sat under a shady tree and enjoyed more strawberries. Yummmmm!
At the end of our snack – she had strawberries everywhere (all down her shirt, all down her face and arms, on her legs, on her shorts…)! We had a blast!
The next day she wanted more strawberries. So, I stripped her down to her diaper and let her have at it.
She practically looked like she had been in battle by the time she was done…
More please?
Thinking about going again next week.
Brianna is all about doing things herself these days, and in general she prefers to do whatever I am doing. If my hair is in a pony tail, her hair must be in a pony tail. If I have “naked feet” she must also have “naked feet.” As a bonus, this behavior even extends to chores! I got out some gloves to pull a particularly nasty and prickly weed – she could not wait to put them on and pull some weeds herself.
Hard at work searching for some weeds…
She also insists that she “help” load the dishwasher, put the soap in the dishwasher, and she loves to sweep! Is it too much to hope that she will always want to do these things?
Today we took Leia to the vet for a follow up appointment. I am very happy to report that her blood pressure has significantly improved thanks to two different medications (down from 220 to 140!), and her kidney values are only mildly elevated from where they were before. We are all hoping that with the improved blood pressure, her kidney values will return to normal (at least what is normal for her) – the doctor assures me this is quite possible! Brianna has come along to most of Leia’s recent doctor visits – she is so cute about it too! She insists that Leia’s carrier be next to her in the car so she can pat the carrier and tell Leia “it o.k. Pooh Bear” (sorry it is a little blurry).
She took it one step further after we got home and decided her Bla Bla needed to go to the doctor too. Packed up and ready to go (see the Bla Bla in the carrier…)
Off we go!
Might need to do some shopping too…
Brianna is fully into her twos – complete with opinions, crazy antics, and sheer fun. For example, she is fascinated by my shoes – me wearing my shoes, her wearing my shoes, Colleen wearing my shoes…
When I took her in for her two-year checkup, she came in at 34″ tall (50%) and 24.8 lb. (25%). I am not too sure the height is correct. First, she wouldn’t exactly stay still (she was not pleased to be participating at that point). Second, she has pretty consistently stayed at 25% for height, which would put her just under 33″. Lastly, as you can see below, her height according to her giraffe her Poppa installed is closer to 33″ (really closer to 32.25″ when you get her to stand right and push down on her hair).
She “passed” all her milestone tests, and did pretty well with her doctor until it came time to get a blood sample. And then a shot. She was not happy about that at all, but what really set her off was the bandaids they tried to put on. I have never known a kid to love bandaids so much, except when it comes time to wear them on an actual boo-boo. NO BANDAID! she says…and she means it!
She is, of course, full of all kinds of personality and attitude. I captured these pictures of her while we were playing on the front porch (in between hat modifications, she was rearranging my patio furniture…)
Showing her street cred.
Contemplating the best place to move my patio chair.
And Jason’s personal favorite, the “Kaaaaahhhhhnnnnn” photo.
Saturday afternoon we received an emphatic request for bubbles. Now. Pweeze. She is much better at it than she was the last time she tried. Part of that is because I bought better bubbles, but another part is she just understands better how to wave her wand around (video coming soon).
I am including this photo just because I like it. She explicitly requested a pony tail like Mommy’s, and then made me put mine up in one too.
And finally, last night we had ribs – she LOVED them. She repeatedly pestered us for “big one”. Since she was so cute eating her big ribs, I had to get a picture.
