Cookie night 2012

Lucy came along again this year for our annual cookie night with ABC:


Good thing Daddy has long arms!



 

Auntie got Lucy her own apron!

 

Getting caught eating the sprinkles...

 

 

 

 

 

"Cheeeeeeeeese!"

 

 



Lucy had a lot of fun making cookies - rolling the dough and using the cookie cutters, then sprinkling the iced cookies - but she came and went...she left us several times to tend to her babies.

After the cookies were made and decorated, all of the kiddies got their pjs on and cuddled up on the couch to watch Elf.

Ponytail!

Guess who has enough hair for a real ponytail...and knows how cute it is!

 

(These pics were taken the first week of December so this news is almost a month old...)

21 months old...on Christmas!

It's hard to believe but my sweet baby girl is nearly 2 years old!
She now weighs 29 pounds and 7.5 ounces
She is 33.5 inches tall

As your child's communication skills improve, some - but unfortunately not all - of her temper tantrums will fade away. Encourage her new expressiveness by helping her use words to let you know what she needs. Just don't hold out for complete sentences quite yet.

YOUR BABY IS 92 WEEKS OLD

At this point, your toddler probably loves to hum or sing songs. She may also be trying to carry a tune, which is to say the notes she sings may vary in pitch. She might have a sense of timing when she sings. Try clapping or tapping along and encourage her to do the same when she's listening to music. And introduce her to simple rhyming songs - it's a great way to get her experimenting with sounds and words.                                                              
I got both of those blurbs in my email this week...
At times it seems clear that Lucy is approaching her terrible twos!  Other times, it almost seems like we may be able to avoid them, or at least get lucky with the severity.  Only time will tell but she continues to be a good communicator, both with spoken words and signed words.  She knows the sign for "help" and can also say it clearly so Dave and I have been encouraging her to ask for help.  Often, she'll be playing nicely by herself but suddenly burst out in a fit - crying and stomping and flailing arms...We just gently ask her, "Lucy, what do you need?" and 9 times out of 10, she'll stop the fit and say/sign help.  She gets frustrated easily, which may be something she picked up from her mama...

She's definitely becoming quite a little songstress...just today, she was signing Happy Birthday in the car!  And remember that "La la, la la la Lucy" song I made up?  She totally signs that one!  She breaks out in the "Lucy song" on her own but will also sing it upon request (if she's in the mood).

Lucy is also starting to put multiple words together.  Yesterday she and I were in her room playing and she came across her blocks.  She and her daddy play with blocks together a lot.  Dave was downstairs and she yelled down, "Daddy!  Blocks!  Baby!  Bed!"
He's pretty handy with the blocks and usually builds something for her baby out of them and she was yelling down asking him to come build her baby a bed out of blocks!
He was enjoying some quiet time downstairs but how could he say no to that??

Christmas is a'comin'!

We went to lunch with Santa at the city building last weekend and this was as close as my girl would get to Santa:

Not bad!  I had her on my opposite hip, closer to Santa, and she wiggled around to get herself a little further away from the big guy but I was still proud of her!

She had fun making some crafts, eating some pizza, and running around with Alli.

 

Last night we went to the Festival of Lights at the Cincinnati Zoo with GranJan and Grandpa.  Lucy was in a MOOD at first so we were all a little unsure of how the night would go but it turned out to be a nice night!

 

They had a little workshop set up where kids could write a letter to Santa (or, in Lucy's case, scribble all over a letter template) so Daddy helped her with hers.

GranJan and Grandpa showed her where to "mail" her letter (though she opted to keep hers instead).

Remember when...

...she did NOT hate Santa?

 

I just logged onto the city's website to look at pictures from lunch with Santa last week...they are not up there yet but I looked back to last year's lunch and came across this cute little photo!

Last year cousin Alli was so afraid of Santa Claus that she couldn't be in the same room as him and screamed if he appeared to look her way...she only agreed to go near his chair when he had vacated it and then she posed with her little cousin:

 

This year, the tables were turned...Alli hopped on the jolly man's lap several times while Lucy clung to her daddy for dear life whenever they got close to Santa...

The funny thing is, Lucy loves to talk about Santa and point out images of him.  She likes looking at Christmas lights and pointing out Santa figurines and she likes her Santa cup and she likes her Santa socks...but when it comes to the "real" Santa...not such a big fan...

Maybe next year!

Lucy's craft

Smart!

YOUR BABY IS 89 WEEKS OLD

At this age, your toddler probably loves any type of movement. Her running has most likely grown much more smooth, she can stand on one foot while holding someone’s hand or a piece of furniture, she squats a lot when she’s playing, and she loves to climb on anything she can. She’s still exploring and learning about her world as well as about her body.

She does, indeed, enjoy movement!  She runs frequently and rarely falls - unless purposely.  She once realized she gets a lot of attention for falling and now especially enjoys spinning in circles and falling down.  And as purposeful as these "falls" are (she looks to us for a reaction and usually even starts to laugh before we can say, "Oh no, Lucy, are you okay?!"), she probably also gets quite dizzy!
She's always been a squatter and continues to squat for long stretches rather than just sit all of the way down, but I have yet to see her stand on one foot...


Lucy has again been wowing all of us with her smarts...I got this text from her babysitter on Monday:
Oh my gosh, Lucy is talking up a storm!  Her vocabulary tripled since the last time I saw her!
When I got there to pick her up, Tammy had written down all of the words Lucy had said that day that she'd never heard from her before...It just warms my heart to see someone else loving my girl and feeling so proud of her!  Hearing compliments about my child is pretty much my favorite!

Two of my favorite "my kid is the smartest kid alive" stories of late:
I've been going through old pictures and trying to organize some things in the basement.  Lucy comes and goes, alternating between "helping" me and playing with her babies.
At one point, she walks over as I was looking at this picture:

She immediately starts to smile and giggle a little but looks at me questioningly...I asked her, "Who is that?" not really sure whether or not she'd know...and she laughed and said, "Pawpaw!"
Fast forward a few nights...last night, my helper and I were wrapping some Christmas gifts and she picked up the copy of the new Batman movie which we'll be gifting someone in just a couple of short weeks.  She pointed to Batman and said to me, "Pawpaw!"
Yep, she now thinks my dad is Batman!  It looks like his cover may be blown...

My auntie and I traded baby girls the other night...while Cleo and I went to get pedicures, Lucy and Donna did a Christmas craft and tended to her babies:

Donna got out Cleo's baby's bed for Lucy to play with and where there used to be many strands of beads, there are now just two.  But Lucy took one look at it and a light bulb went off...she ran away, over to a basket Donna keeps nearby filled with kid's books.  Lucy rooted through that basket until she found what she was looking for - several plastic necklaces!  She brought them over to Donna and signed / demanded "More!" until Donna hung the beads up on the bed.

 

A visit from St. Nick

Since we pull a sleeping Lucy out of bed on weekday mornings to take her to her sitter's house, she wasn't able to check her stocking yesterday morning...it had to wait until we got home last night (though it seems St. Nick also visited her at Cooper's house!)

So last night we talked a little bit about our stockings and how St. Nick comes and puts presents inside...then I asked Lucy where her stocking was and she headed to the basement door and said "'stairs."

We headed down to check it out:

Looks like he came!

Posing with the stockings before digging in

 Lucy dug right in and kept repeating "presents"

 

Lucy's loot!


And St. Nick didn't forget mom and dad...Daddy got "Horrible Bosses" and some new gloves and a bag of M&Ms and Mama got a new planner and some scratch offs!


Last night Lucy and I had to go to Kroger after dinner...my girl loves going to Kroger!  As we drove up our street, I pointed out the Christmas lights and she was telling me what she saw: "Blue!" for a house decorated in blue lights and "Santa!" who she spotted many times in our neighbor's displays...and when we got to the top of the street, she kept saying "more" and "lights" so I told her we could go look at more lights after Kroger...and I'll be darned if she didn't remember.  After about 20 minutes in Kroger, as I was putting her back into the car, she kept saying "Lights, lights!" so we went and looked at more lights and she loved it!

Stay back, Santa!

Last weekend, Lucy's friend Dominic invited us to a little Christmas party:

She had fun watching the clowns put on a little show and especially liked the part where they gave her a candy cane (it was a fruity one, not peppermint...I believe it was Spree flavored).

What she did not care for, however, was meeting Santa:

Sad but funny...

We waited in line to see Santa and all through the line, we talked about how she was going to see Santa and sit with him to have her picture taken, then she'd get a ticket from the elf, which we'd turn in for a present...and then we'd get lunch.  Lucy was feeling pretty hungry at this point and chose to focus only on the "lunch" part of our talk so she was caught off guard when it was Santa time.  Dave was holding her and told me to be ready to snap the picture super fast and I did...so she was up there for all of 2 seconds...2 horrible, traumatic, miserable seconds...and as soon as I picked her up, she was done crying!

We'll be having another Santa run-in at the city building next weekend...wonder if that will go any better?

How cute is her outfit??  My mom found it at Kirkland's...I believe it was at the end of the Christmas season last year...I didn't even know they had clothes there!