September 2015

A few of my favorite mispronunciations right now:  wiv woom = living room, pizzya = pizza, over Vere (with a very hard V) = over there, Kinney = Kinley.

Two of your teachers have separately mentioned to me that you sing a lot at school.  This warms my heart.  Miss Hara told me that she asked if Mommy plays a lot of music at home and you said yes.  This makes me feel good because I really do try to make music a big part of our day.  Today Miss Sunshine told me that you serenaded the class with Yellow Submarine while playing in the sand box a few days ago.

You often take your animals potty.  You get them toilet paper and everything.

This week you wanted to try sleeping in undies and you stayed dry the whole night.  We aren't ready to transition completely, but I consider it a good sign that you are headed in that direction.

We have been doing a lot of "projects" lately, which really means lots of crafts.  This is the day you wanted to do a "Kinley project," which I decided would mean making a life-size Kinley.  I traced you on the paper then did my best to fill in the missing pieces.  It looks nothing like you because I'm no artist, but you were very pleased and still talk about Kinley Project regularly.

Posing with Kinley Project and also modeling your new rain boots for wet days at school.

We've played a lot of school lately.  You have deemed your bedroom to be school when we are at home and often tell us we need to go to bedroom school.  Upon walking in to bedroom school, your name immediately becomes Miss Kinley and returns to just Kinley upon exiting.

Another project:  homemade crayons.  Or rather, re-made crayons.  We took the paper off an old set of crayons and melted them down in the oven so that they are now multi-colored crayons.  I think I was more interested in this than you, but that's alright.

Painting.  Starts out gently with a paintbrush....

....and ends in this.

There is a show you like to watch called Tumble Leaf where they find an everyday object in the "finding place" at the beginning of each episode and then end up finding different uses for the object throughout the course of the show.  One day you told me you'd found something in the finding place, which gave me the idea to make a finding place of our own.  Some days I have a hard time coming up with ideas, but you love it and I'm doing my best.  On this day, there was a milk carton in the finding place.  We always talk first about what we know we can do with the object (pour milk) and then figure out another use for it (in this case, we made boats).  Then you got to play with the boats in your pool and Other Lola even got to ride in them.

Your new swimsuit that you got to pick out for Hawaii next month.  It was twice the price of the ones I was looking at but it was "the only one you liked" and you can be quite convincing.

This month several of your animals have gotten new names.  Big Bunny is now Little Sister (from the Little Critter books).  Daddy got out two of his Donatello action figures, which you've deemed PC and Little PC.  We're pretty sure this stems from Daddy telling me about the most recent episode of South Park he watched last week.  Proof that no conversation is safe.  And, our favorite, Dadoo is now Roast Beef.  Named after a sandwich.

This month we started a new family tradition of Friday night movie night.  We order pizza then have popcorn and watch a movie and all of us sleep on the floor in the living room.  It's been lots of fun and this is really the first time you've watched any movies.  First time you had popcorn, too!  You love it and I love creating good ways for us to have quality family time.  So far we have watched Cars, Toy Story, and Mary Poppins and you've liked them all (or the parts you stayed awake for anyway).  I think Toy Story has been your favorite.

Finding place item:  funnel (alternative use being a megaphone).

Finding place item:  straw.  We made a game where we had to use the straw to blow cotton balls into a square on the floor.

You love baking bread at school so much (you get to every Wednesday) that we've started making pretzels at home so you can get your fix in between.

You also make vegetable soup every Tuesday at school and we bring a vegetable to contribute each week and you and your classmates get to help cut vegetables.

You were asking for candy in the grocery store a couple of weeks ago.  I asked what you wanted and it was chocolate.  I haven't really found any dairy-free chocolate so the next day I decided we could make you a non-dairy chocolate cake if we made it from scratch.  It was fun and a big hit with both of us!

Finding place item:  paper bags.

More crafting.

Getting ready for your 2.5 year check up and making use of last year's Halloween costume accessories.

Post-dinner song & dance party.

Crafting again.

Finding place item:  plastic forks.  Which we used to make designs in paint.  Until you decided to ditch the forks and just go for the fingers.

Finding place item:  plastic knives.  We used these to make a snack by spreading peanut butter on toast, then cutting bananas to put on top.

"Reading."

We went to a party a few weeks ago at someone's house who had a mostly paved yard (not uncommon in LA) with a small patch of artificial grass.  We let you take your shoes off and run around in the grass and you had a ball.  When we left Daddy suggested we should get some for our balcony, which I think is GENIUS!  Here is the day it arrived and I spread it out in the living room until we could get it cut to size.  Excitement for sure.  You were running so fast in circles this was the only picture I got that wasn't completely blurry.

And here it is installed.  We're all loving it.

Halloween costume finished!  Added bonus:  you can put it on yourself!

Beach trip!

Trading out photos from our new Steber family pictures.  Now we just have to figure out a way to get all of Daddy's family together at one time so we can get pictures with them too!

Morning after movie night.  You love to cuddle with Daddy.

Waiting at the doctor's office.  Everything went well.  You are 40.25 inches tall and 43 lbs 7 oz.  I also got to talk to Dr. Nourmand about the dairy intolerance.  For now, we are going to keep you off dairy at home, and keep you off cow's milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, etc. all the time.  But when we are at friends' houses or restaurants aren't going to worry so much about hidden ingredients and see how that goes.