This month
was busy as usual, not necessarily with any particular things, but just the
combination of Ben’s work and grad school with normal life and a few holidays
thrown in made it busy. We had fun this
month celebrating Alethea’s birthday (see previous entry) and we had fun
celebrating Valentine’s Day all in the same week which included an awesome
dinner out alone for Mommy and Daddy too. J My family was in town for all of those bigger
official celebration times so that was fun.
Me and my sweet girl
Valentine’s Day was the first
day my parents were in town (well they got here in the afternoon) and we had
fun eating a lot of heart shaped goodies including pancakes, grilled cheeses
and pizzas. We even got to go over for
some fun Valentine’s treats at the clubhouse of our townhome complex, which
Alethea thoroughly enjoyed. Alethea and
I also did several Valentine’s themed art and painting in the days leading up
to Valentine’s. So fun!
Valentine's breakfast
Watching Elmo on Papaw's phone, lol
Valentine's lunch
Valentine's dinner
Everyone else's dinner :-)
Flowers from Ben
Ring around the rosie with Mamaw
At church with Mamaw and Papaw
At the Battery heading to dinner
Say Cheese!
Post dinner pic...it was actually cold in Charleston, lol
"hello?!"
One super
fun thing we got to do this month was take a drive up to Florence, SC to visit
with my cousin, his wife, and their new baby boy. Alethea was a great traveler and we really
enjoyed catching up and meeting the newest member of the family. Owen definitely stole the show that day….maybe
a little bit shared with Alethea at times too. J
Naptime on the way to Florence
Posing with Jenny and Owen
Sweet baby Owen
She wanted Jenny to read all of Owen's books
kisses for Owen
And Bryant got in on the reading too
Ben has had another busy month
with grad school and work. Thankfully we
are at the 1 month countdown until he is completely done so that is super
nice. But for now he has a ton of
projects to complete, including presentations, and at work, on top of all of
his normal responsibilities, he is preparing for an audit. Plus, if work and grad school wasn’t enough
to overwhelm the poor guy, he found out this month that he will be having his
first interview (several actually) at the very beginning of March. So he has been spending half of the month
preparing for that too. He is heading to
Houston, TX to interview for jobs at an interview conference, but we are hoping
that he will be chosen for one closer to family in Louisville, KY.
As for me, I am definitely still
pregnant, 25 weeks on the last day of the month. That is taking up much of my energy, but not
too bad most days until Alethea’s bedtime.
Alethea and I are having fun spending time together and looking forward
to a little less rain so we can enjoy the outdoors more. I have however been able to keep up my
running this month, with quite a few more solo runs in the mix, which have been
an awesome sanity keeper as well as physical release. I have also continued to enjoy cooking out of
my new cookbooks and taking some recipes from pinterest as well. We have been enjoying some yumminess for
sure!
This month has been a big month
for Alethea, especially considering she turned the big 2 on the 21st! That is still hard to believe no matter how
many times I say/write it. I took her
stats and she is still growing like a weed.
She is up to 36.5 (above 99th percentile) inches tall and
28lbs 6.4oz (85th percentile).
She hasn’t gained any new pearly whites recently though; we are still
awaiting the arrival of her 2 year molars.
We had her 2 year well checkup and the doctor said everything is looking
great and she is developing just right.
Cheesin' with her monkey
Potty training is going
awesome. We haven’t really had any pee
accidents since the first few weeks and we only have the rare poop accidents
that usually occur as she is running to the bathroom, lol. She is rocking naptime and we haven’t had an
accident since the first week. And at
bedtime, since we started waking her up to pee as we go to bed, she has only
had one accident (and that was because I think she just drank too much right
before bed and peed before we went to bed).
Yay for 24/7 underwear and a break from diapers (and diaper laundry)
until June!
Went in to take her to the potty, only to discover this cuteness still holding her glow bracelets
She is developing more and more into
a little chatter box. I feel like she is
constantly talking about something and mimicking everything we say. She is easily saying the expected 50 words
(even if some of them are in her own translation) and she is saying 2 to 3 word
phrases often with the occasional 4+ word phrase thrown in there. I am truly amazed with how quickly
communicating with words has developed for her and become something she truly
enjoys.
Pizza fun with Uncle "Can-nee" aka Camden
She loves to read...even the newspaper
but of course she loves to read Elmo
One of her new favorite phrases is to say “come back” and she especially
loves to do this when she gets up from nap to ask me to come back to get her or
when I tell her in the morning that Daddy is already at work and she says “come
back Daddy?” So much fun and I love to see her develop her inflections too. Another fave is for her to say “are you…?” to
whoever she is looking for and then she either looks for them or hides for them
to find her. One of my favorites that
she says now is that she says “good gob” (translation: good job) when Mommy,
Daddy, or Alethea do something well and then she claps. She especially loves to do this when any of
us goes to the potty, lol. She has also
converted to saying “mommy” and “daddy” instead of “mama” and “dada” which I love. I especially love her sweet call from the
door after naptime to request my presence.
This month she is really loving interactive playtime a lot. She loves to tell her daddy to tickler her
and then she runs away saying “no tick!”
It is such a fun game to watch them play and to hear all the giggles
involved. She also got in some fun
rounds of hide and seek when Mamaw and Papaw were here and that is a new
favorite. This month she also started to
go through the process of pretending to put mommy/daddy to bed and go through
the same routine that we go through with her (including full narration of the
whole process, lol). A random tidbit
about her playtime is that she is developing a love for lining things up,
especially all of her beanie babies.
Reading in her toy closet with Daddy
"no tick!"
She continues to get better at her colors and does an excellent job at
identifying the 8 basic ones pretty regularly.
When I take her on my runs, she loves to point out all the different
colored cars. We have also had fun with
counting this month and she has finally started saying “three”. In the past, she would also say “two” in
place of “three” so I was really excited about that. However, if she is counting by herself she
simply goes back and forth between 1 and 2 and she loves to say “one, two, go!”
and then run down the hallway. Her
favorite songs of late seem to be “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” and “If
You’re Happy and You Know It” and she loves to sing along with those. I am absolutely loving listening to her love
for music grow and hearing my little songbird sing!
This month we had fun going to watch Ben play in his last Navy intramural
basketball league and Alethea loved saying “yay Daddy” and pointing out the fact
that he was on the court. She actually
surprised me with how well she did at the games and we only had one potty
accident that was a result of an unfortunate private area injury. But thankfully that healed quickly, so it
wasn’t a big deal. She also really
enjoyed her art work this month and even made a frame for Daddy for Valentine’s
Day.
One, not so fun for Mommy, but exciting adventure for her that she went
on was at Walmart. We were picking up
some Valentine’s day stuff and I was stopping to look at the boxers to see if
there were any fun ones to get Ben. Next
thing I knew she was gone. I went the
direction I thought she was, but didn’t find her. She wasn’t in the cart, as she usually was,
because it had been so rainy and we were trying to go out somewhere for her to
walk around and adventure. I just didn’t
have this kind of adventure in mind, lol.
They actually were in the process of calling a code adam when thankfully
a worker brought her to my location with headbands around her head. She had gone one section over (several
clothing racks and out of sight though) to try on the little girls headbands
and she was all smile having a blast.
Most insane and scary 20 minutes of my life, but definitely a lesson
learned in how quickly she can juke her way out of sight.
My little artist
very focused
Color wonder markers are awesome!
Art in the bath?...why not? :-)
Missed a spot on the bottom of her foot, lol
Her eating is going quite well.
She never ceases to amaze me with just how much she will eat sometimes
and how little she will eat on rare occasions.
I am also frequently surprised with what she will eat sometimes,
especially if it is paired with ketchup.
I keep telling Ben that I need to stop expecting her to eat something
and that is when she actually will, lol.
We are even making headway into veggies on occasion, yay!
And last of all, she is starting to really show her two-year-old-ness of
late. She is entering into the zone of
limit testing. When she is given choices
she likes to try to throw in a 3rd choice to see what happens. We obviously don’t give in, but sometimes it
results in some not so fun power struggles.
Thankfully we have only had a few times where they have lasted for any
period of time once her feelings are acknowledged and we give her a chance to
get it out without our attention focused on her. It will be interesting to see
how things go as she continues to develop a will of her own.
This makes me smile...showing off her findings from our walk :-)
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