beanski

twenty-eight months

She’s my snuggler, my girl, my sweet. She always wants Mama, will settle for Daddy and is getting better and better at branching out to a stranger here or there. I hurt my back this month and she was so sweet, telling me she “loves me SO MUCH” and insisting that she hurt her back too so that she can lay down next to me on the couch. 
 
She loved Halloween this year, so happy to have an excuse to demand candy. I have called her Mu Shu Chicken pretty much since she was born. Sometimes on my way home from work I’ll say things like “How was your day, Chicken?” without another thought about it. So after asking her at least 100 times what she wanted to be for Halloween and getting no answer I decided she was going as a chicken. And I’m not even kidding the very next day she decided she wanted to be a frog. I tried to put the chicken costume on her and she cried and cried and cried begging to be a frog. So I sent the chicken costume back and bought her a frog costume. What Renee wants, Renee gets. Just ask her. Numerous times this month she said "I'm the boss, Mommy."

We hired a babysitter for the first time this month and she was totally cool with it. I told her that Katie was going to play with her for a while and that we’d be back and she was all like “whatevs, dudes, have fun.” When we got home I scooped her up and hugged and kissed her and asked her if she had fun and she said she did. I almost died. She had fun with someone other than us, she’s really living on the edge. 
 
Her relationship with her brother is growing stronger. She’ll finally allow him to take a bath at the same time as her and she likes to push him in the swing and make him laugh. He’ll climb up next to her on her chair in the living room and they’ll both start giggling. Most of the time she’s swiping stuff off of him but once in a while she’ll give him something and say “Here you go, Cammon” and she smiles sweetly when we make a big deal about how good of a big sister she is. She wants us to believe she doesn’t like him but we know better.  
 
One day out of no where when I was putting her to bed this month she asked me to leave the overhead light on in her room. I don’t know where it come from but she is pretty adamant about it. I leave it on while she reads in bed and then I go up and turn it off after she’s been in bed for a half an hour or so. Very strange. She has also woken up screaming a few times this month and she doesn’t really seem awake when I get in there to soothe her, she just seems scared. I think she must be having bad dreams or is afraid of the dark. 
 
She had memorized quite a few of her books, reading them to us at night now before bed. She loves Cars, Trucks and Things that Go and giggles and sings a little “Goldbug, goldbug, where are you?” song when we’re looking for him. She’s a cheese ball and fake laughs when she’s trying to be funny to get a laugh out of us. The best part is that she knows when we are being sarcastic and is sarcastic back. 
 
She calls her stuffed animals her “friends” which totally kills me. We lost her favorite Mr. Tiger this month and Ski and I both moped around for two weeks feeling like there had been a death in the family. Every single morning and every single night she’d ask where he was and our hearts would break. Then we got a replacement thanks to Nena who made a special trip to the zoo for her and she was so happy to see him. She was like "Mr. Tiger, where have you BEEN?"
 
She’s starting to like girly things in general, INSISTS on wearing sparkly shoes that she calls “BEAUTIFUL” every where she goes. Once in a while now she’ll let me put a barrette in her hair but most of the time she still pulls them out right away. 

She’s shy and will only talk to us with a whisper when she’s in big groups of people. It makes both her dad and I laugh. Well, almost everything she does makes her dad and I laugh. I really can't imagine what we'll do for fun when she grows up and moves out. We're going to have to go back to watching comedies and sitcoms and they are not comparatively funny.
 

twenty-seven months

Ski told Renee he was going to get her a glass of milk the other day and then forgot about it. She waited patiently for about five minutes and then said, "Dad, where is my milt?" He said, "Oh, I'm sorry, honey, I totally forgot" and she looked at him totally straight-faced and said "It's OK, Daddy, it's not YOUR fault." I'd like to know whose fault it is.

She's really in to everyone having a mommy. Her little safari animals are her favorite. She'll find the little giraffe and say "I wonder where his mommy is. Oh, THERE SHE IS." And then she looks at me and says, "And YOU'RE my mommy. I love my mommy." Let's say it all together now. AHHHHH.

She likes stickers the best. Window stickers, Fancy Nancy, Dora puffy stickers. She carries them around in this little Christmas basket with bells on it. Her second favorite toy is a toothbrush. I can understand her brother liking the toothbrush (he's teething) but I find it odd how many times a day she wants to brush her teeth. And she wants to use MY toothbrush. Gross. There are some things just not worth arguing about though and this is one of them. Toothbrushes are cheap :)

I love how she has figured out that asking nice gets her further than demanding. For a while there she'd start yelling and screaming demanding fruit snacks or candy or "something special." Then one day she said "Mommy I want some fruit snacks PLEASE"and she smiled sweetly and she got her way. So now she'll demand TV and milk in her whiny voice and when that doesn't work she shifts to "Want to watch ONE show and have a glass of milk PLEASE." She plays me like a fiddle.

When we're laying down in her room at night to read books before bed and I tell her to pick out some books she ALWAYS says "My hands are too full." I do not know where she got this but it makes me laugh every single time. It's like she's saying "DUDE, I'm way too lazy to walk over there and get books, you go get them for me." YES BOSS, I'll get right on that. She has this book with various animal imitations and I love how she runs around her room before bed galloping and saying "Giddyup-a-loo." Cutest.Thing.Ever.

She doesn't forget a thing. I gave her a piece of licorice one day on our way home from daycare and now EVERY SINGLE DAY when I buckle her in to her seat after work she says "Want licorice." I tell her that I don't have any today and she says "Well, you'll have to stop and get me some." She's got it all figured out. Oh you don't have any of that? JUST GO TO THE STORE AND GET SOME, MOM. DUH.
 
She still likes tea parties and her playground and playdoh. She likes to make a huge mess with finger paint and to run through the sprinkler. We started making forts a lot this month and when we build her a good one she says "That makes me so HAPPY." The sheet we often use for the roof has a hole in it and she demands that I "patch it" with a different blanket. The blanket obsession is sort of over-the-top, she goes to bed with about six of them and some of them are queen-size.

We're doing swimming lessons again right now and she doesn't listen to a single word the teacher says. She dances to her own beat, wanting to the exact opposite of everything she is told to do. She can sing entire songs and giggles to herself proudly as she's singing them. Her favorites are No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, ABCs, Ring Around the Rosie, Happy Birthday and Itsy Bitsy Spider. I love that she says FIDER for SPIDER.

But the sweetness, oh my god the sweetness. There was a period there where I thought we were going to be arguing with her for EVERYTHING but luckily it only lasted a short while. For the most part she does what we ask of her, sometimes doing the opposite but not in a spiteful way, more in a playful way. When I tell her that it's time to change her diaper she bolts and giggles.  
  
She likes dresses and sparkly shoes (SO PRETTY) but still refuses to let me comb her hair or put it in a ponytail. When the nail polish wears off her toenails she demands that I redo them. The curls are growing longer and more unmanagable by the day and I don't care. I like it wild.

She still loves Dora the best but her infatuation right now is with Swiper. She scrunches up her nose and says "Swiper swipes stuff, Mommy." On our way to swimming class the other night I honestly think she thought Swiper himself was going to jump out of the bushes on our way and take her swimsuit. She kept telling me that I had to "watch out for him." She also is relating words (even the Spanish ones) in the shows to real life. The other night when she was climbing up her playground she started singing "Sube, Sube" (To Climb).
 
She's the perfect balance of rotten and sweet, of funny and serious, of gentle and playful. And once in a while now she'll even let me bribe her with an "EmaEm" [M&M] to take her picture.
 

twenty-six months

My little Rosie Roe, my Mu Shu Chicken, my Baby Girl.
 
"No Mommy, I'm a BIG GIRL, I'm not a baby." She's Baby Girl to me and she always will be. I tell her that and she glares at me like I'm a total moron. Like, GET A GRIP LADY, I ALREADY TOLD YOU THAT I'M A BIG GIRL. I keep telling you and you don't listen. You must have worms for brains. INSERT ROLL OF EYES HERE.
 
She rolls her eyes. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? She's twenty-six months old and she's already rolling her eyes at me. I'm SCREWED.
 
She is obessed with legos. We play legos all day every day. We build bridges and garages and houses and boats. And really big towers with huge staircases. She's starting to color code them. It makes me smile. 

She says Boonta Beentie all of the time and I have no idea what it is. It's like she's making up her own language. Ski and I find ourselves saying it too. When you don't know what to say, Boonta Beentie works. TRY IT. I DARE you.
She's BOSSY with a capital B. She has started putting the phrase RIGHT NOW at the end of requests. Last night she looked at Ski and said "You go put my blankies in my room RIGHT NOW." He just stopped and said EXCUSE ME? And she repeated herself. He and I couldn't even make eye contact because we would have busted out laughing. I'm holding out hope that she'll learn to like her brother once he starts following orders, the little drill sergeant.

She loves to play Hide and Seek and will close her eyes and count to five while I hide. She squeals with delight when she finds me. When it's her turn to hide she wanders around the house while I count and when I open my eyes she's standing right in front of me and says "There's me!" So we've got the seeking part down but are still working on the hiding.     
We went north for Sarah's birthday party this month and my sister Jen gave Renee some peas out of her garden and I'm pretty sure the little girl single-handedly cleaned my sister out of her pea crop for the year. She must have eaten fifty peas, she had Auntie Vicki and Papa sneaking her peas all day long. When I give her peas for dinner now she says "No like those peas, like Auntie Jen's peas." It's safe to say she's a pea snob.

I love how she tells me to BE CAREFUL! when I'm walking down the stairs and how she claps and says "Yeah Mommy" when I cook dinner or water the plants. HIL-AR-I-OUS. I love it when I give her something she wants and she looks at me and says "Mommy, you make me SO happy."

The feeling is mutual.

twenty-five months

This post is better late than never, I think. At least that's what I tell myself. I wouldn't want to miss this month because it's been full of big changes. In addition to turning 2, Renee spent three entire days in the care of someone besides her dad and I and she lived to tell the tale. She repaid me by insisting that I never leave her side again though, not even Daddy is good enough for her now. She used to inform us that "It was Daddy's turn last night so it's Mommy's turn tonight" when we asked her who she wants to read her books before bed, keeping tally to make sure her time with us was evenly split. Since we moved she has refused to let him put her to bed and last night when I was laying next to her reading books she said, "I love you, Mommy. I missed you SO MUCH." And then my heart split in two and I died. But I died happy.
 
She also got a new house and a new bedroom and a new backyard. You would think this would scare her but it didn't. Once she realized that her throne (the chair that she sits in when she watching Dora in the living room) and her crib were there, she was totally fine. When she went into the new bedroom and I asked her whose room it was, she smiled sweetly and said "Me's," recognizing her crib and bedding and stuff on the walls.  
 
That was pretty much it until she realized that our new neighborhood doesn't have a playground. We had gotten into the habit of going to the playground every night after dinner and last night she was all like, "Finish eating people and LET'S GO." I felt pretty bad. On my current TODO list: Find a pimp playground nearby. STAT.
 
She travels with an entourage, insisting that I carry her as well as fifteen stuffed animals up and down the stairs every day. AND her blankies (TWO of them) AND her pillow. Seriously, she insists on having all of this stuff crammed onto her throne with her. She is partial to Mr. Doggie, Mr. Tiger and Elmo though and refuses to leave home without them. She can thank her dad for the (not-so-creative) names. I tried to get her to name the stuffed tiger "Fred" and she looked at me like I had lost my ever-loving mind and said, "That's Mr. Tiger, Mommy." DUH.
 
She loves to build houses with blocks, loves legos and likes to read. The "Just ONE more book, Mommy" game goes on for HOURS sometimes before bed. She laughs like she knows she's pulling a fast one on me every time I give in. Going down the slides at the playground is still her favorite past-time and she still HATES the swing.  
She narrates our shopping trips. When we are driving by Target she says "Ahhh, there's Taaaget" and "Let's go drive the car cart at the grocery store" when we drive by Cub. She also requests a muffin the minute we enter the grocery store. The muffin is actually a donut hole. It took me a few days to figure out what in the heck she was talking about. She had a donut hole at daycare (called a muffin) and then saw them at the grocery store and started asking for them. Gotta love it. She also knew just what an Oreo was and the other day saw a popsicle on a t-shirt and said "MMMM Popsicles." It's no wonder she doesn't eat at home, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to compete with popsicles, Oreos and donut holes.
 
I love it how she closes her eyes and pretends like she's sleeping when I got in to get her out of bed in the morning. She rolls over and says "I'm still sleeping" with this adorable little smirk on her face.
 
Her brother annoys her, which makes me sad. He is ENAMORED with her and she just totally blows him off like she's too cool for him. She screeches these high pitched screams when he crawls over to see what she is playing with and just last week she clocked him on the head so hard with a toy that he had an instant bruise. She ended up in Extended Time Out that day. Extended Time Out is code for HOLY CRAP, Mama is pissed off and you better get out of my sight before I LOSE IT. I've never seen her be aggressive like that and I had NO IDEA what to do. She doesn't like Time Outs and will cry when we put her in one so they seem to be working.
 
She got a new pet fish for her new house and she loves to feed him and watch him eat. The first thing she says to me in the morning is "Mr. Fish slept in my room last night, let's feed him." She giggles uncontrollably every time the fish gobbles up one of those little pellets.

She's a good kid, about as sweet as they come. She likes to make us happy, thriving on our praise and you can just tell that she dwells on it when she gets in trouble. When she smiles and giggles the whole world is a better place and when she's crabby, watch the frick out.  

twenty-four months

I've struggled with whether or no to discontinue her monthly posts when she turned two, thinking that maybe I could do without the pressure of getting it done on-time and wondering if there would be anything to write about. And then over the weekend I was thinking about how really she is just getting good and then Ski said something to me along the lines of "you need to make sure you put that in your monthly post" and I decided then and there that I was going to keep doing them. I absolutely love being able to go back and read about what she was up to and it amazes me each time I do how much my mind forgets. It makes me take the time to sit down and reflect on her life, on her childhood and I hope that someday she gets a kick out of reading about herself as a baby and then a toddler and then a pre-schooler (BabyCenter is STILL mocking me, last year with the implication that she turned from baby to toddler over night and this year to pre-schooler).

She is particular about what she likes right now and has nothing to do with her toys at all. She wants to play outside or watch Dora and as far as she's concerned those are the only two choices. She loves slides and to play in the water. She loves her little pool, still likes the water table and LOVES to throw rocks into the lake.

She bolts up the driveway with a look over her shoulder that's just daring me to try catch her. When I speed up to make sure she doesn't get close to the road, she literally squeals with delight.

She doesn't eat much at all, blueberries, watermelon, cantaloupe, broccoli, cheese and once in a while a chicken nugget. She would rather drink her dinner in the form of milk. I'm beginning to think that as long as I send her a gallon of milk a week at college, she should be good to go. That's about all she requires right now.

I think she is pretty scared about the upcoming move. When I ask her if she is excited about her new house and her new room she says "No Mommy, I love THIS house" and then starts crying. I'm crossing my fingers that it only takes her a few days to get adjusted. It is going to be a big change.

She is picking up on words and phrases that she probably shouldn't. The other night the kids were playing what we call One Up, One Down where the second you lay down after putting one of them to sleep, the other wakes up. I was laying next to her after she had JUST fallen asleep and I heard him start screaming. I muttered a word I probably shouldn't have and she kept saying "fuct" over and over like she knew it was a word she shouldn't say. I hate to bite my lip to stop from laughing.

Ski always jokes around when he's going to change her diaper and apparently must occasionally say 'Diaper Up' because the other day he told her to come over so he could change her diaper and she looked at him totally straight-faced and said 'Diaper Up.' We both laughed for hours about that one.

She insists on being carried and directs me around. Today after we got home from work she was throwing her little hissy fit about not wanting to go inside and then when she realized I wasn't going to give in on that, she started demanding milk and Dora. She all as-a-matter-of-factly said "You go that way and then use your other hand to get the milk." I'm not kidding, she said it exactly like that.

She says "No, No" whenever she wants to assert a negative.  Never just No, always "No, No." And she says "YES" very directly with an emphasis on the S. It cracks us both up. She still says "Mow" for more and "No like it" when she gets upset about something. 

My Renee, she's something special. So particular and so loyal and so stinking girly. She looks girly and when she holds her cups, she holds them like you would think a girl would. When she spills she gets upset and demands "clean me up" but is totally fine having her hands and feet caked with dirt while she's playing outside. She doesn't like shoes and will literally run around the neighborhood with no shoes on. Just when I think I have her all figured out, she changes things up on me. Just when I think she's not going to like something, she does and just when I think she has become a Daddy's Girl forever and ever, she snuggles up close to me and cups my face in her hands and says "My Mommy. I love my Mommy." And then she always follows that up with, "And I love Daddy too. And Cammon. And Simon. And Sashy." And that pretty much sums it up, she loves us all and it is impossible to put in to words how much we love her back.
 

 

twenty-three months

I really could go on and on and ON about how this month was the best month yet and about how I wish I could bottle up her cuteness forever and ever. She has us in hysterics pretty much all day long.
She goes to bed with a book all by herself now, no struggle, no pleading, just a goodnight hug and a kiss. I tuck her in and tell her that I love her after we read her stories and she says "Night, Night Mommy, sleep tight. BYE!"
The predictability is so refreshing and welcomed when you have a baby in the house. The two year old? She's got nothing. She doesn't even scratch the surface of difficult. I would have fifteen kids if they came out like Renee is right now and stayed that way forever. FIFTEEN.

I curse the day that I took her to the playground all excited to show her the swings and the slides and the bridges because now whenever we are outside or driving in the car all she can talk about is how she wants to go to the playground RIGHT NOW. She says HAVE IT! when she sees a slide in someone's yard and then she repeats her request to play on it over and over and OVER until I find myself begging her to please just shut up already. 
She loves puppies and bunnies and when she sees someone walking with their dog she says "HAVE HIM." And Ski and I just laugh because the dog? It is SO not happening. I can't even handle the kids and the cats, can you imagine life with a dog? SHOOT ME. I have to admit she makes it sound pretty appealing though when she says "Please, have him, Mommy?"
She's fallen in love with TV and if we're not outside with her she would prefer to sit on that couch and belly up to the milk bar and watch Go Diego Go! I love how when I ask her if she wants to watch Diego she says Go Diego Go! Like she is telling me that I'm getting the name of the show all wrong. I absolutely love how she puts up her pointer finger and says "ONE show, Mommy. ONE show!" circumventing the limit she knows is coming. And each and every time I turn on the show she follows up that request with "Glass of Milt." She still begs for milk pretty much all day long. Given the choice of ice cream and milk the girl would take the milk.

I would have promised her a lifetime of chocolate when I was on maternity leave if she'd just sit on the couch and watch FIVE MINUTES of a show and now I'm back to pushing the blocks and the trains and the Little People. I think if Cameron had been born when she was 23 months old I would significantly less wrinkles.
It makes me smile every single time I warn her to be careful doing something or tell her that we are going inside in five minutes and she looks at me and says "O-tay."
She apparently doesn't like big diggers because with all of the construction around town right now she spends pretty much all of our car rides saying "No like digger, Mommy, no like big digger." I tell her that I don't like diggers either and that we should go get our nails done instead.

She doesn't like me to take her picture anymore and says "Mommy, no picture"  with a whine when I get the camera out. You'd think she'd be used to it seeing as how I've had the thing plastered to my forehead since the day she was born. She glares at me when I try to take her picture.
I love how she says "EWWW" when I change Cam's dirty diaper or when one of the cats puke in the house. Her brother is always going for her hair and the tattling has already started. If you get him too close to her she says "Cammon, no pull my hair or Cammon no tickle me." I love that grammar is all wrong.
She has started to play pretend, feeding Elmo grapes and blueberries and building houses with staircases with her blocks. She LOVES playdoh more than anything else in the world and sort of wants to like finger painting. She likes it for the first few minutes and then decides she wants her hands washed.
She pees on the potty almost every night before bed and we are getting ready to make a run at potty training. She is interested and understands it. I'm still a little concerned that she is still waking up with pretty wet diapers in the mornings and I know that is one of the signs that I'm supposed to be looking for but I figure we should at least try it now while she interested and loves to read her potty books.

She's a sweet little girl, my Renee. There are so many days when I look at her and I just can't believe how lucky I am to be her mom. I can't believe how much I took for granted when she was a baby and I can't believe that I ever once thought she was difficult. She shares better than any kid I have ever seen, giving her brother toys without prompting and has always been a good sleeper and a good eater. She rolls through changes easily as long as mom and dad are close by. She's still pretty shy around people that she doesn't see very often. I have been putting together pictures of the last year for her birthday coming up and my heart breaks when I see how much she has grown, how much she has changed, how independent she has gotten in the last year. I love her at twenty-three months as much as I have ever loved another stage of her life and I love that little girl more than I have ever loved another human being. I am so incredibly proud to be her mommy.

twenty-two months

It took five months but I eventually found a way to remind my girl just how much I love her and how much I need her. It has been well documented and witnessed by every relative under the sun that for the first five months after I brought her brother home from the hospital, my girl, my best girl, wanted nothing to do with me. She cried if I tried to read her a story or give her a bath or put her down for a nap. She wanted Daddy. She changed her mind one day this month and now she is demanding Mommy for EVERYTHING again. I'm not complaining.

The first night that she requested that I put her to bed after her bath I laid there on the floor snuggled in close to her on her big pink pillow and wept. I sobbed all the way through Go Dog Go! both times she made me read it. I told her how much I missed her and that I was sorry that I was busy taking care of her brother and didn't get to read her very many stories lately. I vowed that things would change. I promised. I pulled her in as close and I could and I smelled her freshly washed hair and touched her face and studied each and every inch of her. I can't put into words how much I missed her, how I longed for that closeness again and how incredibly happy I am to have it back.

She now knows the routes we take to go to certain places, dictating THAT WAY or NO MOMMY, OTHER WAY when we are driving in the van. When we go through the tunnels she wants to go swimming and she cries when she realizes that's not where we are going. She demands MUFFINS when I'm driving home from daycare because she wants to go to the grocery store and get a free donut hole.

Her bedtime ritual is by far my favorite part of the day and it always follows the EXACT same chain of events. 1. "Renee, are you ready to head upstairs and get ready for bed?" 2. "GLASS OF MILT! GLASS OF MILT!" 3. Get said glass of milt and ask her 47 times if you could please carry it up the stairs so that she doesn't fall on her face. 4. Get to top of stairs, try to shut the gate. "NAE SHUT GATE!" 5. Renee shuts the gate. 6. Renee goes to her room and demands that we move her big pillow from her floor onto Mommy and Daddy's bed. 7. She then demands Mr. Tiger and Mr. Doggie (you can thank my husband for those uber creative names). 8. "BLANTIES, MOMMY!" 9. I get the blankets (she has two matching blankets that was intended to be one for back-up but NO, she wants them both now. At all times.) 10. She lays down on our bed and literally chugs every last drop of her milk. 11. We all go to Cam's room and she tries on all of his various hats and then she cries for a while about wanting to sit in the rocking chair. 12. Bath. 13. Wrestle flailing body into PJs while she tries to run away from us jumping on the bed. 14. Attempt to tame the wild mane (she HATES to have her hair combed or touched) 15. Lay down and read stories. She has to read each book two times. It is the weirdest thing I have ever seen. Not three times or four times, ALWAYS twice. She cries when I turn out the light and then falls asleep within seconds of me laying back down next to her.

She absolutely loves to be outside and throws Category Five fits every time it is time to go in. A-N-N-O-Y-I-N-G. She doesn't like to get her hands dirty and she told me her shoes needed to be cleaned the other day. I wiped off the top but I have to draw the line somewhere. And that line is being drawn at cleaning the BOTTOM of shoes, even if nothing would make Renee happier.

She says Messy or Ishy when she spills something and can NOT relax until it is cleaned up. A girl after my own heart. She doesn't like change of any sort and insists on wearing the exact same coat and the exact same pair of shoes every single day. If I try to put a different jacket on her, she cries and says "NO, OTHER COAT MOMMY!" I LOVE to buy little girl shoes but really it is totally a waste of money because once she decides she likes a pair that is all she will wear.

She started singing this month, totally out of tune with inflection all wrong and it makes me laugh so hard. She sings Happy Birthday and her ABCs and she'll start singing the next Laurie Berkner song on the DVD before it starts. She gets to the Q in her ABCs before she sort of fizzles off like she isn't sure how it goes and she skips the letter E and the letter M EVERY SINGLE TIME.

She counts everything but it is usually out of order. I ask her how many kisses she wants when I'm leaving for work and without fail, every single time, she requests five. So we count each of the five kisses and she whines a bit about me leaving. She talks in sentences. The other day she looked at me and said "Simon puked and Mommy cleaned it up. Ishy." I laughed out loud. Seriously, where did my baby go?

I'm excited to hear all about what she learns next. She's OBVIOUSLY a super genius and she picks up things so fast, is so curious and creative and excited to learn all about the world. I can't wait to show her the flowers and the trees budding (DO YOU HEAR ME, DULUTH? IT IS TIME FOR THE TREES TO BUD). I can't wait to teach her how to water the gardens. I can hardly wait to pick her the first flower out of the garden and give it to her to rip apart. Seeing the world, this great big world, through their eyes is the greatest thing about these children. The excitement and the awe over simple things that we take for granted. The funny thing is that I'm in just as much awe as she is except it is not over the flowers or the squirrels or the robin, I am in awe with her.   

twenty-one months

It took Renee three and a half months to even attempt to utter her brother’s name. When we’d ask her to say Cameron or Cam she’d say BABY and then she’d laugh, like she was saying “There is absolutely no way I’m going to acknowledge that thing has a name.” It was worth the wait because one day this month she looked at me and said “Hammon’s shoes” and I just about died laughing.

She also decided this month that Hammon being big enough to play with things is totally not acceptable to her. He can’t so much as look at a toy, a block, a shoe and she rips it out of his hands or moves it far enough away from him that’s she’s certain he can’t reach it. "MINE!" Is currently her favorite word. SIGH. I guess it had to happen some time but I have to admit that there was this part of me that thought my superior parenting skills had instilled such wonderful morals in my daughter that she understood the importance of sharing at the ripe age of sixteen months. For the first three months of his life she would give him whatever I asked her to give him. Now what one giveth, one taketh away. Forcefully.

She’s still sweet about half the time though. The other day I told her to "watch her brother" while I ran to change the laundry and as soon as the words came out of my mouth I thought, "Are you MAD, woman, she's going to kill him." But, I did it anyways because she looked pleased with me asking and when I came back up she was laying on her belly on the floor next to him saying "Hi Hammon" and kissing his round little cheeks. She can try to tell me she doesn't love him but I'm not fooled.
 
She came home from daycare one day saying "Oopadaisy" and honestly I don’t think there is anything cuter in the world than when she rams her shopping cart into the couch, looks at me, laughs this little evil laugh and says, “Oopadaisy.” Then, she puts her chin down and bats her little eyelashes at me like she just KNOWS she’s cute.

She has also mastered her glare; the glare that I am certain will be shot at me at least once per minute when she is a teenager. She looks at me like I smell, like there is nothing more vile in the world than her mother who didn’t jump the minute she snapped her little fingers.
 
She can count from one to five but won’t do so unless I ask her, “What comes after One?” She says “TWO!” And “What comes after Two, Renee?” She giggles and says “TWEE!”

It drove me bat crazy mad that for the longest time she called every W she came across an M. Well, she finally got it right the other day and I reinjured my back jumping up and down screaming “Yeah Renee!” in celebration.

I am physically incapable of cutting her hair, her mullet of ringlets growing longer and more absurd by the day. I just can't do it, the curls are too blessed cute and I guess there is a part of me that feels like once I start cutting and styling her hair she won't be a baby anymore. Once in a while I trim her bangs and we call it good. She probably gets teased by the other kids at school but whatevs, my mom put a bowl on my head and gave me a mushroom cut for my first day of kindergarten and I lived to tell the tale.

She gives me big barrel hugs and wet, sloppy kisses before bed at night before snuggling in to read the Elmo Lift and Flap book for the seven thousandth time.

She loves water boots and insists on putting them on and watching the episode of Jack’s Big Music Show where Laurie Berkner wears B-O-O-T-S and dances around in them. And for a kid that cries when she comes in to contact with snow, she apparently loves rain and water. She walks through and splashes in each and every puddle on her way in from the garage. Then she flips the frick out because I didn't get her wet shoes and socks off fast enough.

She has sort of fallen out of love with The Jonas Brothers, preferring Laurie Berkner and Neko Case instead. She still loves music of any kind though. I think the phrase I hear most often around the house or in the van right now is “More musit, peas mama.”

She struggles with the hard C or K sounds, milk is still "milt" and music is still "musit." I think I will probably shed a tear or two the first time I hear her get them right because those two words sort of define her toddler hood to me.
 
She talks in sentences for the most part and says “Mama, big blue late [lake]” when we are driving home. She loves watching for school buses and city buses and the mail man when we are driving and she counts “One sool bus, two sool bus.”
 
Is it possible that this is the same baby that just yesterday was vomiting all over my shoulder every seventeen seconds and crying for hours on end? The transformation is astonishing, it is like black magic, in the blink of an eye she went from helpless to fairly self-sufficient, from crying every time we left the room to shutting herself in her room and refusing to let us in. I imagine I’ll get to blink once or twice more and she’ll be off getting married and having her own kids. I have to admit there is half of me that is sad by that proposition of half of me that secretly can't wait. Because when you're the grandma you actually get to sit down once in a while.

twenty months

Oh, Miss Renee, she never runs out of things for me to say about her. She's always coming up with something over-the-top to make me laugh or to make me bite my tongue to stop myself from yelling at her. She’s a special girl.

She is very particular about everything. Everything in our house has its assigned place, and moving something as small as a toy from one side of the living room to the other has her pointing and directing and demanding that we move it back. It clearly disturbs her. If her bedtime routine is altered in ANY way, down to what order her dad takes off his glasses and turns off the light, she loses her shit. She gets angry at me if I do something that her dad usually does and demands 'Daddy DO' even if he is gone and won’t be home for several hours. I would love to say that I have no idea where she gets this behavior from but I can’t. She didn’t stand a chance. BOTH of her parents are creatures of habit and love routine. By day four of a seven day vacation we are both generally ready to go home, to the familiar, to the comfortable and she feels the same way. HOMEBODIES, the lot of us. Maybe Cameron stands a chance of being adventurous and free-spirited but I'm not holding my breath.

I made the mistake of giving her a 'special treat' after her shots at eighteen months. The treat came in the form of a product called YoBits which is really fruit-flavored corn syrup coated with some sort of fake yogurt-like product that I had purchased during a somewhat vulnerable moment while walking through Target in a sleep-deprived stupor shortly after Cameron was born. You would think I was giving her molten chocolate cake with fresh whipped crème and caramel ice cream because she walks around the house demanding 'TWEATS!' all of the time now.

I think Becky must be giving her a bit of juice at daycare because she says 'Apple deece' the minute we open the fridge. Rather than fight her on it I would put about an ounce of juice in with five ounces of water and give it to her and she would be all proud walking around with her 'deece.' Then, last week I realized that if I give her straight water in the cup that she thinks juice comes in she doesn’t seem to notice. I am smarter than you, Renee, always remember that.

She’s obsessed with comparing things and gets especially excited when there is two of something. When she sees her toy guitar she runs over and points at her dad’s guitar and says 'two ditars or 'two whammy.' I love that she knows what a whammy bar is.

She loves to get the mail and starts talking about it the instant I pick her up from daycare. She got a new toy house thingy for Christmas that we just put together last weekend and it has a mailbox and fake mail and you would not believe how many hours of peace and quiet we have gotten out of it. That toy is worth its weight in gold. She’ll sit there all day and put the mail in and take it out and ring the doorbell and play the radio. It cracks me up every single time she goes to the door and says 'Knot, knot'…whether it is on the bathroom door when one of us is in there or on her toy house door.

She's mimicking everything we say and absolutely loves music of any kind. She loves to put her rain boots on and dance around to Laurie Berkner. Even the annoying, electronic music on Cameron's exesaucer can get her shaking her little booty. She wants to read books that aren't in the correct holiday. Her favorite books right now are her Christmas and Halloween books.

She learned her colors this month and is sure to tell us what color EVERYTHING is. I love how green is gween and blue is boo. She loves to have tea parties and is very particular about what color cup everyone gets. Ski’s is always red, mine is always pink and Yadi’s is always green. I love how she sets 'Yadi’s pup' right next to her when she’s napping like the cat is going to wake up, grow thumbs and suddenly learn how to drink from a cup. The other day I found the green cup in the cat’s food dish. I love how she runs, not walks, from the living room to her play kitchen to fill the cups up before delivering them to their rightful owner. I love how proud she is of herself and how she says 'Yeah Nae!' when she’s done something she knows we’ll get excited about.

She woke up one day this month and decided that she wanted to sleep with a pillow and a stuffed animal in addition to her beloved green blankies so now in addition to a blanket corner in each hand she lays on a pillow with her doggie under her arm when she sleeps. It cracks me up every night when I go in to check on her on my way to bed, all snuggled in with her lovies.

When she’s not sick or teething she’s an awesome eater actually asking me the other day for 'mo bok-li' (more broccoli) and 'mo skash (more squash).' I think she probably put on at least a couple of pounds in the last couple of weeks, devouring everything we put on her plate like she was catching up from fasting for two months while she was sick and getting molars. She loves carrots and peas and chicken and pork and demands that she has some sort of dipping sauce for her meat. I love how she says 'mo sauce, pees (more sauce, please).' I have taken to giving her mashed up avocado or pureed squash as a "sauce” and she is totally cool with that. She has never taken a bite of any sort of beef product that she hasn’t spit out, whether it is a cheeseburger or a taco or in some form of casserole. She is a fruit and cheese kind of girl (a girl after my own heart) and often leaves most of her starch on her plate, be it rice or noodles or bread. The insane amounts of fruit are good for her but it makes the thought of ever potty training a daunting thought. She still poops 2-3 times a day at odd times and it is mushy. I’m sorry but cleaning mushy poop out of one of those little potties (or GOD FORBID out of her underwear) pushes my gag reflexes to the limit. I think I’ll have kids in diapers for the next five or six years, thank-you-very-much.

She still absolutely LOVES milk and whines when she finishes what's in her glass and says 'Mo milt.' I love how milk has a T instead of a K at the end. I love how she puts it off to the side of her mouth and literally chugs every last drop the instant you give it to her.
 
All of the pictures I have of her recently have her missing some article of clothing because she HATES pants and socks and boots and hats and well, shirts. She’d prefer to be in just her diaper at all times. She has her boots, socks and hat off within seconds of being strapped in to her car seat and requests 'pants OFF' when we are changing her diaper. She’s going to be one of those adults that hangs out at nudist colonies, I swear it. It drives both Ski and I absolutely insane, it is not like we are dressing her in lacey, itchy clothes; I am talking sweats and a cotton shirt here, people. I just don’t understand the problem.

She gives the sweetest hugs and kisses and has started running over and giving me a huge squeeze and a nice, wet kiss on the lips when I’m leaving to go somewhere. I think she is trying to say “I love you” with something that sounds like “I ahhoo” and it MELTS the very heart out of my chest. Because the love I have for that kid, it could move mountains. There are days when I look at her and I feel the emotion rising up out of my chest in an almost painful way and I realize that because of her I know what it is truly like to love someone so much it hurts.

 

nineteen months

Renee spent approximately 15 of the 31 days that made up this torturous month sick with some sort of ailment. She had the flu for the first ten days, pooping like a trooper every 30 seconds and crying incessantly about her diaper rash. She threw up any food she tried to eat and refused to drink anything except milk. Go ahead, you try to convince an 18 month old that clear liquids are a better choice for her upset belly. She lost a bunch of weight and it hurt my heart to look at her. We had her 18 month well busy visit and she weighed in at 21 pounds 15 ounces...less than she weighed at 15 months. She adamantly refused to be measured for height so that will likely remain a mystery indefinitely. S-P-I-R-I-T-E-D.

Then, she got better and was healthy long enough to pop out six teeth, four of which were molars, open some kick ass Christmas presents at Nena and Grumpa's and then she caught a cold. The mother of all colds. She was up all night, coughing like she smokes a pack a day and the volumes of snot that were pouring out of her nose was astonishing. For all intensive purposes I sort of feel like I should get a do-over for this entire month. An entire month of my 12 weeks off to spend with the kids and she was sick all.fricking.month.

On a bright note, the Steelers are going to the Superbowl! She finds and spikes the football any time she sees football on TV. I can't give her credit for the idea, however, I'm fairly confident that it took a bit of coaching from her dad.
 
If I had a quarter for every minute I have spent trying to talk her into wearing pants or socks, I would be a rich, rich woman. She points at her pants the second we finally get them on her and demands 'OFF.' She is completely obsessed with turning things on and off and instantly looks for the on/off switch the minute she touches anything. Once she locates that, she starts looking for the batteries. I love how she says batteries. ba-DEES.

I love how she stands at my feet when she wants to be picked up, stomps her right foot and demands 'Mommy UP.' It's the way she says it and the look on her face that I love so much. She may as well put her little hands on her hips and stick her little lip out. I assume that is the next step. For now, we laugh at the stomp.

Her love affair with the kitties has been rekindled. She stalks them trying to play with them via their toys and not-so-gently petting them. She calls them both Yadi which we think stems from Sashi which is our nickname for our cat, Sasha. There is no distinction though, they are both Yadi. She says it so regularly that Ski and I have started calling them Yadi. I just love how she says 'Hi Yadi' or 'Bye Kitties' when she's coming or going.

She goes straight for Cam's bouncy seat when it's vacant which isn't often and she sits in and it and looks at me like 'What are you going to do about it, lady?' When I ask her who that seat belongs to she says 'Baby' and doesn't move an inch. I think she's daring me to kick her out. She finds her baby and bottle and feeds her baby while I feed Cam. She snatches his Soothies and bolts any time I happen to set one down. She's asserting her dominance left and right. For a while it made me mad but now it makes me laugh.

We are doing Aqua Tots at the Y with her friend Max and I love how she gets all pumped up getting her suit on and says 'Hi Max' over and over and over until we get there and then she clams up like she's too nervous to actually talk to him. I think she has her first crush.

She repeats EVERYTHING we say and is stringing words together in sentences. She can identify about half of the letters in the alphabet via her alphabet puzzle or her name on the wall of her bedroom. Last night when she was coming in to say goodnight to Cameron and I, she looked up at his name on the wall out of the blue, pointed at it and said 'e'. And then she pointed out the 'n'. Then she said 'Bye' all as a matter of factly and headed off with dad to bed. To think she used to cry when I left. Now I get a 'BYE' like it ain't no thing but a chicken wing. I guess this is a good development but there are days when it makes my heart hurt. My baby, my big girl, I can feel her growing up and moving away from me. I tell her every day on our way home from daycare that she has two choices of colleges; the two that are within 5 miles of our house. I just hope if I say it enough times she'll remember :)