Visitors, swim lessons, etc.

Uncle Jeff and Auntie Ema came over on Friday night.
They had dinner with us, the we played in the living room and in the basement but then we came back upstairs.  Lucy watched The Little Mermaid while the rest of us played Euchre but ever since then if I ask her who came to see us, she has said, "Jeff!  Tent."
She doesn't let just anyone in her tent (Dave is often allowed in, I am usually NOT allowed in) but Jeff worked his way into the tent, welcome or not, and it made a lasting impression on the Lucy girl.

Uncle Jeff also couldn't resist trying out the tunnel but Lucy knew it wasn't right:

Building with Auntie Ema

Fighting with Uncle Jeff

Our family considered joining the YMCA - until we learned how much a membership costs - because we were interested in signing Lucy up for swim lessons.  We didn't join but still planned to do the lessons but I kept failing to follow up.  I finally remembered to call yesterday afternoon and was told they began THAT NIGHT.  
We were able to make it happen, though, and when we told Lucy about it, she was SO excited. She kept asking to go swimming, to go to the swimming pool, to put on her swimsuit, etc.  It was cute seeing her so excited but we had to get through dinner first!
When we got there and signed in and got dressed, we were still about 10 minutes early and Lucy was really itching to get into the pool...she kept inching closer and closer and I'd let her stick her feet in but she wanted more...

Finally, it was time to get in and at first, she was still sooo excited and so happy...but very quickly, she turned from the image on the left to the image on the right...

We've been having some difficulties with Lucy at bath time lately...namely, she HATES baths now.  We can't figure out what it is, exactly.  She fights going in and lately sometimes cries through the entire bath, though other times there are happy, fun moments mixed in.  
My theory is that she doesn't like her face getting wet (though she never used to mind this and would simply shake her head and blink a lot if water got on her face during hair-washing) but that doesn't explain everything.  
I worried about swim lessons, thinking she has some new problem with water, but she was so excited at first...these lessons are twice a week for the rest of the month so wish us luck on Thursday!  
Daddy and Lucy swam together for the first class but she cried for me so much, they got out  before class was dismissed...



"Minutes"
Lucy constantly says this...we must often say "in a few minutes" when she asks for things because she's picked it up from somewhere!  We'll tell her it's almost time for bed, bath, dinner, whatever...and she say, "Minutes!"  She'll go to bed, get in the tub, eat dinner, whatever...in a few minutes.  She cracks us up!

Pardon the blurry pic - she was in motion - but this is her new "wacky smile" she likes to give!

Time of her life!

Lucy was invited to her friend Reese's 3rd birthday party at a place in Milford called Recreations Outlet.  Dave couldn't join us because he was bowling with Adam and friends so just us girls headed up on Saturday evening.
Lucy had SO. MUCH. FUN.
She was a little nervous and shy at first but after a quick look around, she knew just what to do and she was off!

Basically the place was a showroom of various outdoor play equipment but kids could also play on the showroom stock!  The little celebrators had the place to themselves and it was fun to watch all of the little kids running around like they owned the place...

Lucy shot hoops:

And she drove a pink car and did some hanging:

And, of course, she played with Patty.  At one point, Lucy was sitting in this little pretend diner (so cute!) and asked, "Baby?"  I told her she was in her diaper bag in the party room and asked if she wanted me to go get her...of course, she said yes.  While I was across the way getting the doll, I could hear Lucy yelling, "Mama!  Patty!  Play, now!"  Sheesh!  I guess I wasn't quick enough...

Funny freakin' stuff:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/82459568@N05/8445070170/in/photostream
(She jumped on a trampoline!)

Super short but super cute:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/82459568@N05/8444008507/in/photostream/


Lucy literally has too many babies to name...I believe the current count is around 19 (which does not include a generic Barbie doll she calls "baby" and the American Girl doll Grandma & Grandpa Meyers got her who will stay safe in the closet until Lucy's a little bit older).  She has her Boo doll (who was actually MINE) from Monster's Inc. and she calls her Boo and we've started naming some of the others.  There's Patty, the Bitty Baby.  We just started rattling off names, being careful not to choose the name of a family member (a difficult task!) until we found one Lucy could pronounce well.  We've recently come up with a name for another baby of hers that she plays with a lot - Abby is the doll from Grandma and Grandpa with the butterfly on her shirt.
Before the party on Saturday night, we did a little playing in the snow (finally a chance for Lucy to wear her snow boots!):

Our family: Mama, Lucygirl, Daddy

She wanted to get into the shed so badly - probably because she knows some of her things are in there (pink car, wagon, etc.) but she lost that battle...

YOUR BABY IS 97 WEEKS OLD

Have you noticed that your toddler is no longer as interested in the cat’s dish or taking things out of drawers? Instead, she’s probably starting to play pretend with her animals, trucks or doll. Another sign that her powers of imagination are increasing: She loves to play dress up. This type of imaginative play is an important way for a toddler to experience control over her life (she can make that baby go to sleep!) and experiment with different ways of feeling and being.                                                            

Lucy still really enjoys taking things out of drawers (specifically MY things out of MY drawers...but she also LOVES emptying her pants drawer!  It's baffles me but every time we're in her room and I ask if she wants to pick out her pjs for the night, she says yes but opens her pants drawer.  I laugh and say, "That's not where the jammies are!" and she gives me an evil giggle and yells "Pants!" and gets out at least a third of the pants and distributed them around the upstairs...).
However, she also loves playing with her babies (have I ever mentioned that about my girl?) and pretends with them all of the time.  She doesn't show much interest in dress up herself but likes changing her baby's diaper and taking babies clothes on and off.  She pretends with them all of the time - rocking them and sh-sh-sh'ing them (and telling us to "sh" if her baby's sleeping), feeding them (pretend food!) and she frequently gets in her police car and tells us she's going to either Cooper's house or to Kroger (always to buy milk).  Just yesterday she was handing me fake handfuls of something she concocted in her kitchen.


She has been singing more than ever.  Last night, Dave took her up to bed and I heard Lucy singing over the monitor (never a good sign because it means bedtime is going to take longer than usual).  If you're familiar with The Little Mermaid, you'll remember the part where Ariel sings a little tune when the sea witch is taking her voice...AaaaAaaaAaaAaaa...anyway, I could have sworn that was the tune Lucy was singing last night over the monitor but I figured I was going crazy until Dave came down and said, "She was singing like Ariel."


The other day I taught Lucy to say, "Oh geez" to Dave about something and she has since said it many times, some of which have been unprompted and used in the correct context!  Hilarious!

If I say, "Can you say, 'I love Mama!'" Lucy will say:
"I love you.  Mama."  It's incredible.  
Last night at the Superbowl party she said it to Donna: "I love you.  Nonna."

2 months til she's 2 (a 22 month old stats post)

She's almost two!
Suddenly she seems very tall and we're anxious to see, at her next doctor appointment (March 29), where she falls in the height percentage.
She is now 33 and 3/4 inches tall.
She weighs a little less than she did at this time last month, perhaps due to a reduced appetite while she had a cold last week.
She weighs 28 pounds and 14 ounces.

We had a playdate with the Kennedy girls last Sunday which was a lot of fun.  We wish we could have played with the Burns twins, too, but they were under the weather - another play date that will include them is in the works!

  

Yes, Lucy managed to wear two different outfits during the 2 hour playdate...she spilled (spilled...poured...what's the difference?) her entire cup of water down her orignal shirt).

The girls seemed to have fun...both Kennedys were asleep when we arrived and once Lucy warmed up (aka, realized I wasn't leaving her), she enjoyed having free reign of their cool toys...including an indoor slide she went down about 30 times! 
CB has a Hello Kitty airplane that Lucy really liked playing with...I think it reminded her of her Little People toys because it had three cats that fit in the airplane seats.  At one point, I vaguely remember her walking over to me, while I was talking to Christa, and putting one of the cats down my shirt (have I ever mentioned that my kid is WEIRD?  Because she kind of is...)  I forgot about it until later that day when a little kitty worked its way to the ground - we totally stole a kitty from the playdate!
She was pretty sweet to Karli once she woke up, bringing her various toys she thought she'd like to play with.
Before we left, Claire gave Lucy a nice, long hug...it was pretty sweet!  Lucy stiffly stood, letting it happen, but did not wrap her arms around her friend...we're thinking about hosting the next adventure so we'll see if Lucy has gotten any better about sharing her toys!


One of Lucy's most frequently used signs?  "Cookie."

Yes, she often asks for cookies and her daddy recently let her see him twist the lid off of an Oreo and now she always wants her lid removed...and as it turns out, she's most interested in the white filling (though she still manages to leave a lot of evidence on her face of enjoying the dark cookie, too).


For awhile now, I have thought Lucy had enough hair to wear actual pigtails but haven't taken the time to try it - until last weekend:

How freakin' cute??  It's adorable but also makes her look OLD!  Like...a two year old or something!


Lucy has been putting many words together lately and we're amazed everytime! 
Her "sentences" tend to be a little choppy, though: 
The other night on the way home from GranJan and Grandpa's house, she realized Dave wasn't with us (he'd driven seperately) and asked about Daddy...I told her Daddy was staying at GranJan's house to watch tv with Uncle Jason and she kept yelling, "Daddy!  Home!  Play!"  She wanted her daddy to come home and play with us instead of hanging out with Uncle Jason...

 

As much as she plays independently, Lucygirl also has a tendency to get sucked in by the tv...recently when she was sick, we caught Tangled on tv and she really liked that and we watched Finding Nemo that weekend, too.
We've been watching The Little Mermaid in the evenings - each night after bath we let her choose what she wants to watch for about a half an hour before bed and lately Ariel always wins.  Other favorites include her 1st birthday DVD, Signing Time or "songs" - a Baby Genius sing-along DVD.
I am not a huge fan of her watching a lot of tv but we do limit it at home and often it's educational...

At night, we rock her to sleep and sing to her - this process typically takes about 10 minutes. We've been encouraged by Dr. D to put her to bed awake and let her work that out for herself but we don't really know why...at first, we mentioned that she sometimes wakes in the night and needs to be soothed back to sleep and he said she needs to put herself to sleep in the first place and that will stop.  So we actually tried it for a bit but the waking-in-the-night-and-needing-to-be-soothes did NOT stop so we went back to our old ways, which - for the most part - we all enjoy.
I usually sing multiple songs but when it seems like she's asleep, I stop at the end of that song.  Sometimes, she is NOT yet asleep...and she'll remove the B from her mouth and say "songs" - sometimes without ever opening her eyes!  I love when she does that (though it's hard not to laugh rather than start singing again).  Other times she simply does the sign for "more."

Pretty little smile!

Some other Lucy funnies:
When she's thinking about something ("Lucy, where are all of your combs?" - combs that she's stolen from the changing table and are always missing when needed), she taps her chins and says, "Hmm."
She loves singing...recently we detected "Take Me out to the Ballgame" and last night she was singing "Hush Little Baby."  Really loudly.
She loves hopping...there is a segment in one of her Signing Times DVDs called "The Hopkins Hop" and she can totally do it...it says, "Hop to the left, hop to the right.  Don't fall down, just hop up HIGH!"  She will start hopping (she actually gets up in the air!) and she says "Lefff!" and usually really does go to the left!  Then she says, "Right!" and hops over to the right...then she falls to the ground but then jumps up and screams, "High!"

We love her!

Favorites

Here are some of my favorite things that my favorite girl says:

She has said the word giraffe for some time now...how could she could she not??  A quick scan of any room in our house will show you at least a half dozen giraffes or giraffe print items...
But my favorite is how she says it...something like j'rash

She has a little trouble with a few different sounds and the "F" sound is one of them...Uncle Jeff's name?  Jesh

She has become obsessed with Desitin, don't ask me why...she's never even really had much of a diaper rash issue, though we've used it occasionally over the past 21+ months for some booty redness...but now she demands "medicine" at every diaper change...only she can't really say "medicine."  It used to come out more like "mess" but has evolved to mennace

A phone is a hone
A crayon is an a-on
A television is a td

The way she pronounces shampoo makes me laugh every single night in the tub when she reaches for it and says chim-pooooo in a sing-song-y voice so that she can wash her baby's hair

In a strange turn of events, she has changed the way she pronounces milk.  It used to be pretty close, something like "mick" but she has recently started calling it something like mince.  Very strange...and very confusing!  When she asks for "mince" we look at her blankly trying to figure it out, which is frustrating for all of us!  We're trying to figure out what the heck she's talking about and she's trying to figure out why she's still thirsty and without milk!  Luckily she shows us the sign and the mystery is solved!  (Of course the mystery of why she now says it like that is still puzzling us!)

Some of her newer or frequently used words include:
Pouch, couch, chair, pillow

My favorite girl

When I ask her, "Who's my baby?' she answers, "Lala!"
Too stinkin' cute!  We can't get her to say her own name, at least not very often.  I've even tried to trick her:
Mama: Can you say 'baby'?
Lucy: BABY!
Mama: Can you say 'table'?
Lucy: Table
Mama: Can you say 'mama'?
Lucy: Mama!
Mama: Can you say 'Lucy'?
Lucy: ME!
But she will say "Lala" and she does know that's her...


We had a zoo day last Saturday...in January!!  It was 65ish and beautiful and Lucy and her baby had fun looking at the penguins (among other animals):

These photos make me laugh...I have no idea what/who Annie and Lucy are looking at and I forgot to ask Tammy...Dominic is looking right at the camera!  These three (along with baby Talia) kept Tammy on her toes last Friday!  This is right after they made some yummy pizza out of clay that was in the art kit Lucy got Dominic for Christmas:

Sometimes Lucy and daddy fight over the remote...guess who always wins...

Lucy lately

What's up in the life of our 21.5 month old?

She is back on a Signing Time kick after a period of not watching it much and she continues to amaze me with the sings she remembers.  The past few nights we have watched the "Going Outside" edition and when they mention a sign, I ask Lucy if she knows what it is before they show us and she always does!  She knew the signs for rain and grass and leaf and those are not signs we typically use...or even signs that I knew!  She just remembered them from the last time we watched it (several months ago).

We now also know the signs for thunder and snow!

Lucy loves to sing and does so frequently!  Dave has always said that she sings when she's tired...even as a baby, she's start to make song-like whines before falling asleep.  She sings at the top of her lungs and sometimes we can kind of figure out what she's singing...she sings "Happy Birthday" a lot and I've also detected some "Old Macdonald's Farm" and "Rockabye Baby!"  Sometimes she sings so loud in my car I turn off the radio and just enjoy the music from the backseat.

She loves to HELP!  If I say I am going to make dinner, suddenly she's right beside me saying/signing, "Help!"  She even helped me make Katie's birthday cake!  I need to find more dinner recipes that she can help with...we make a lot of stovetop items and it's not safe for her to help with those.  She likes to pour things in a bowl and stir, though, so she'd good at mixing cakes!


She's very silly and she's very crazy!  

Dave taught her to do this some time ago...lately, she doesn't even eat all of the cereal before drinking the milk out of the bowl...she's really good at it, too!  Very rarely does so much as a dribble of milk escape!  And sometimes she picks out the soggy cereal and eats it with her hands.

Speaking of cereal - she can be a bit bratty about breakfast.  She basically refuses to eat Cheerios anymore.  She ate Kix for a few days but as soon as she was introduced to Trix...Kix were off her menu.  I bought her Lucky Charms but she's not a fan of those, either...I thought she'd really like Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and I sent them with her to the babysitter's on Tuesday and I'm told she turned her nose up at those, too (she's usually more adventurous with her eating at the sitter's house which is why I sent them there for her to try for the first time).  She eats a banana for breakfast everyday...and sometimes some Trix...

Lucy loves to wash her hands!  And she always need to use soap!  

Her favorite method for drying her hands?  Wipe them on mom's pant leg, of course!

She's a cutie!  Cuddled up watching Monster's, Inc. recently at GranJan and Grandpa's house.

When we first started using the B for sleeping time only, Lucy adapted very well.  She rarely even asked for it and knew as soon as she got up, to put the B down.

Over the past few months, though, we've had a regression...she says she wants to give it to her baby but as soon as we turn our head, she puts it in her own mouth...if we say "No, the baby doesn't need it," she cries...She got a couple of pacifiers for her babies for Christmas and she puts those in her own mouth as well...

Over the holidays we had some late nights and I gave the B to her a few times - but at those times, she was quiet and in pjs and near sleep.  Never do / did I give it to her if she's still dressed and running around playing...

We often play upstairs in her room and she likes to get in her bed...I know this is just in hopes of finding a B "for the baby" but I make sure it's hidden and stick her in there.  She frantically looks for the B and sometimes asks for it but usually just starts jumping or pretending to sleep or turn on her mobile...still, I can't help but be nervous about the day we have to take the B away for good...

I am also getting a little nervous about the whole potty training thing...

We have both kinds of potties and she hasn't really shown a preference (and though the free-standing one is much cuter, Dave and I totally prefer the one that sits on the regular toilet - no clean up!).  She has gone in each kind more than once but with no amount of regularity and it had been awhile...

But on Monday, babysitter Tammy got her to use the pottty TWICE!  We were so excited and grateful to Tammy...Lucy even used the potty again that night at home!  However, she hasn't gone since...Grandma bought her a potty time DVD that we're going to need to start watching regularly.  Her day at Tammy's makes me think she is ready for potty training now...I know I will be pretty pumped when I no longer have to pay for diapers!

Poor little baby!  I have no idea what she did to deserve to have her feet cuffed together but I guess the baby knows and Lucy knows and that's all that matters!

(At the Stallkamp Christmas, we play a game with gifts ranging from $1-$5 in value and we ended up with these cuffs, along with a Nerf-like ball shooter and the Santa plate that Lucy used for every meal for a few days straight).

This girl loves to draw and color.  Recently, she got a hold of a pencil and worked on her artistry while I was on the phone.  For like a minute and a half.  But she managed to cover the fridge, three cabinets and four drawers.  Good thing I hadn't left anything worse than a pencil within her reach!

She got a new little table and chairs from Grandma and Troy for Christmas and she loves to sit there to color.  She really enjoys using her washable markers on paper and can't ever seem to resist also coloring the tips of her fingers...very deliberately, might I add.  And I'll be sitting nearby saying, "Lucy, no, don't color on your fingers!  Only on the paper!" and she will ignore me while she finishes coloring on her fingers...baby wipes actually do a decent job of removing the color right away!

After 14 healthy days of being home with mom and or dad, on the first day Lucy was due to go back to the sitter, she woke up with a fever!  Figures!

Okay, technically she went to bed with the fever, too, but it wasn't very high and we gave her some Children's Advil and thought there was a good chance she'd be fine in the morning.

She was not.

So on what would have been my third day of work this year, I called in to spend the day with my sick girl.  Her fever never did get very high and after 6am, she never had one again (we kept up with the Advil doses and took it easy all day).  At times she was her normal self and at times she was sleepy and slow-moving and very cuddly, which I enjoyed.  We went to my work to fetch my laptop and she was very nice to my coworkers...Gina gave her a banana and she chowed down on that puppy while I got a few things done, then she went on a walk with Denese and went to fill up my water bottle (with Denese's help).  When we left, I told her she wasn't very good at faking sick!

By that evening she was pretty sleepy again so we started bedtime routine early but I let her have her B after bath and she laid on the couch watching tv...but I could tell she was fading so I asked her if she was ready for bed (yes!) and if she needed a new diaper first (yes!).  I picked her up and carried her to the changing table in the dining room and when I laid her down - she was asleep!

My sleepy, sick girl slept well and was back to herself 100% by morning.

That next day was a fun one...we went to get her haircut again!

Remember the last time she went to Ejay's for a haircut?  She wasn't too happy about it...

Back in September 

This time, we talked about it a lot.  I told her we were going to get her haircut and that it would not hurt and it would not take very long...just "snip snip snip" and then, if she didn't cry, maybe the lady would give her some candy.  We had this same little talk many times on Friday and Saturday and even got to the point where I would say "snip snip snip" and she would say "candy candy candy!"

What a Lucygirl won't do for candy!

My girl was SO GOOD!  The stylist was absolutely amazed!  This time, Lucy wore the cape (freaked out about it last time) and sat on the booster in the chair by herself (last time she was on my lap)!  She sat perfectly still on looked up or down when asked and was just amazing...and as soon as she was done, Lucy looked at the stylist and asked, "Candy?"

Too stinkin' cute!

She LOVES when the candy turns her mouth colors!

I let her plan the rest of our day - Skyline for lunch, then the library!

Trains!

My parents also had several days off of work around Christmas and asked us if we wanted to go to Entertrainment Junction one day.  We'd all heard of it but none of us had ever been so we headed up there.

There were so many sights to see that Lucy couldn't be bothered to look at the camera for a photo:

We walked through a very neat train display...entire towns were set up and as we went through, the display showed the evolving times.  Lucy liked seeing the trains but also enjoyed her freedom when she was allowed to walk (run/be chased) on her own.


There was a Christmas town set up and we heard Mrs. Clause was in there (Santa was vacationing after his big night).  We weren't sure what the Lucygirl would think of Mrs. Clause but she did just fine - because Mrs. Clause gave her a yummy cookie!

She wasn't afraid of her at all, and even gave her a little wave as we left her kitchen.

Next we walked through more of the Christmas setup as Lucy munched on her cookie:

Hiding behind some candy canes

There was a little play area where Lucy had a lot of fun:

Climbing the ladder to go down the slide

Her daddy helped her slide a few times but they also had a big climbing area - connected, elevated tubes for the kids to climb up and slide down and peek out the windows at their families from up above - and Lucy wanted to go inside...Dave said, "That's mama's jurisdiction," so in we went...

They also have a fun house and we checked that out as well.
Here's the info on it from their website:

The five sideshow tents are Curtain Chaos, Clown College, Mirror Maze, Crazy Caper adn Outer Limits: Journey Through the Black Hole.

The first sideshow tent houses an all-new mammoth Mirror Maze, but not just any mirror maze - it is one of hte largest of its kind in North America.  Guests enter a disorienting land of illusion, a visual assualt on their sense as they attempt to navigate through an ever-deceiving labrynth of reflections, unable to determine where one mirror ends and the next begins.

All five of us went into the mirror maze (I held Lucy).  Dave got ahead of us and I was kind of freaked out!  All of the walls were mirrors, obviously, and at one point, we could see Dave's reflection and kept reaching out but were unable to make physical contact.  My dad started moving a little faster than us a couple of times and I freaked out and grabbed him - I would not let the "real" dad leave us!  Lucy was confused at first - but curious - and about halfway through, she was kind of done...she never cried or freaked out, though, and was fine once we were out.

A second tent is home to the crazy Clown College with rooms to confound and confuse.  The clowns abandoned the building but left behind a visual jumble of perception distortions, starting with a hallway with clown photos that react when a guest pushes a button to make a clown's bow tie spin or squirt water.  This just begins a bizarre journey of surprises where visitors seem to grow or shrink merely by walking across a room, challenge a tilted room, marvel at a gravity-defying ball that rolls uphill not downhill, and pose in classic  funhouse mirrors that oddly distort the viewer's reflection.

All I can say about this room is...I fell down...the tilted room conquered me and I was trying to grab an escaped Lucy and get the hell out of there...I felt like I was going to barf for some time afterward...

The next attraction is Curtain Chaos, a bewildering maze of twists, turns and dead-ends through hanging curtains that test a visitor's sanity and sense of direction.

This one was pretty neat...another maze, but instead of mirrors, all of the walls were curtains.  Behind most curtains was a wall (though behind one was a toilet-turned-flower pot!).  This one annoyed Lucy and she was "all done" from the moment we walked in.

A fourth attraction is the Outer Limits: Journey Through the Black Hole, which takes visitors on an outer space encounter.  Here, visitors are channeled through a wild, spinning vortex tunnel then launched into a black hole with a dizzying array of glowing stars and planets.  Visitors must escape by squeezing through a claustrophobia room.

I don't think we did this one...it didn't leave an impression if so...

Our fifth and newest attraction is Crazy Caper which features a quest to find the Ring Master's key hidden in his tent.  Booby traps, challenges and various alarms and obstacles throughout provide a laugh inducing challenge to outwit the main man of the circus!

This little obstacle course was pretty fun - there was yarn stretched all around one room with a black light so the yarn was glowing and looked like lasers that you had to navigate without letting them touch you...Lucy sat this one out!