Two!

Avery turned two today!  When she came downstairs for breakfast, it took her a while to notice her gift from us in the middle of the room.  D was able to gift-wrap the entire tricycle.  When Avery finally did notice it, she was very excited.  As she opened a small bit of it she peeked in and said, "Bicycle!"  Close enough!  We forgot to buy her a helmet to go with it (duh!), so she just rode it in the house today.  However, she spent much of her riding time reminding us that we need to buy her a helmet by repeatedly saying, "Helmet!  Need a helmet!" 

To celebrate, we had a very casual party with some of her friends.  I'd intended this spectacular event where the kids sit nicely around the table and decorate the cookies that I'd have already made in a nice clean kitchen.  Um, yeah, that didn't happen, but fortunately, the kids didn't care!  Avery and her friends had a grand time running around, decorating the cookies (somewhat), eating cake, and generally being two-years-old.

These past few weeks have felt like she's growing up so fast.  She's now in her big girl bed (pictures to come now that the sheets have arrived!) and she's now officially potty trained.  I thought potty training would be tough and transitioning to the bed would be easier.  I was wrong.  Potty training, thus far ... knock on wood, has been quite easy.  It took a few days for her to get used to underwear, but from then on it's been smooth sailing.  And, magically, she stays dry through the night now - at least if the past five or six days hold true.  I'm sure we have plenty of potty accidents in our future, but I'm calling the training done and looking at the future accidents as just that.

Transition to the bed has been another story.  She loves her bed, loves the mattress, loves the freedom.  It's that last one that is the problem.  Today's nap was a step in the right direction since it was the first time that I think she's fallen asleep in her bed after I've left the room.  The other times, she's fallen asleep on her floor or something like that.  This time, she got upset when I left the room, then climbed back up to nap in her bed.  I'll take that as improvement.  Daddy is upstairs putting her to sleep for the night, so hopefully it'll be smooth sailing.  I can dream!

Here are a couple of recent pictures.  We went out to a fancy dinner with a friend who was visiting from out of town, so I grabbed the opportunity to dress Avery up a bit.

This one is from this morning, right before she opened her gift from us.  It is going to be tough to tell it from a Christmas picture since she's still in jammies and there is a Christmas tree behind them. In hindsight, maybe we should have gotten her dressed before she came downstairs!  Lesson learned.

Big Girl

It is one week before Avery's second birthday.  I can't believe how quickly she's growing up.  There have been a number of moments recently that make me shake my head and wonder where the last two years have gone.

The first is Avery's ever-expanding vocabulary.  Like any toddler, she learns new words and phrases everyday.  So far, we haven't had an unfortunate repeating of words that should not come out of a toddler's mouth, but keeping her shielded from hearing these words is tough!  Not only do we have to watch our own language, but those around us, and those on the TV.  The exact-phrase-repeating episodes are now so frequent that I fear the moment she repeats a less than desirable phrase she overhears on TV or in the grocery store or wherever.

Avery can now tell me what states Nain (my mom) and Pop Pop (my dad) live in - Colorado and California.  Sometimes it takes her 15-30 seconds after I ask, "Where does Nain live?" for her to come up with Colorado, but if I wait long enough, she usually successfully retrieves the answer from her memory. 

She can also identify all the letters of the alphabet and can sing the ABCs, though the LMNO part is typically muddled and sometimes she misses a letter or two.  Oddly, she doesn't always miss the same letters.  One letter she always gets right, very clearly and loudly is W: "DOUBLE YOUUUUUUUUUUU!"

The other day, we were driving in a parking lot.  It was night, so the signs were lit up with neon and eye catching.  She pointed and said "P!"  I looked at the pharmacy sign and figured she was spotting that particular P.  I said, "Very good!  What is the letter next to the P?"  And she replied, "H!"  I was quite impressed that she was able to move to the next letter on her own.

Avery also likes to play waitress.  She's been doing this a while, but the way she plays is getting a bit more sophisticated every week.  The other night, she decided that Mommy and Daddy were very hungry and that she would feed us.  She would ask us individually if we were hungry, we'd each say yes, then she'd nod her head and say, "Yes. Food!"  She also knows that our favorite drink is Diet Coke, so she's constantly bringing us pretend glasses of Diet Coke. 

Finally, we've made great strides in potty training the past week.  If she's on the main level, she'll take herself into the bathroom*, go potty, then dump it into the big toilet.  I'm usually there by this point and I help her turn on the water to wash her hands.  This is probably in the TMI (too much information) category, but she'll now go both #1 and #2 without much coaxing on the potty.  The #2 took a bit more effort, but in reality she did much of the effort on her own.  

*I should note that she's typically not wearing clothes on the main floor, so I'm not sure how competent she is at removing her pants to go potty. Avery's main state of being is unclothed.  I put 'em on, she takes 'em off.  She runs hot anyway, so we just keep the house a bit warmer and she is perfectly happy.  The other day, she did agree to just wear underwear whilst running around and she was able to remove those herself, but she deemed the kitchen an excellent place to do that, then she ran all the way into the bathroom.  I figure these are small details on our potty training path. :)