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. :)

Mutterings

Avery is talking enough now that she occasionally says some funny things. When D opened the Christmas tree box (yes, it's a tad bit early), Avery looked inside and said, "Oh my gosh!!" She then said that over and over, probably because D and I burst out laughing. It was very funny in context, believe you me. I think I found it more funny because that is not a phrase I use often. If anything, I say, "Oh my god," but she picked up "gosh" somewhere. Good girl.

The second thing that springs to mind when thinking of recent mutterings is Avery's newfound love of the movie Bolt. There's a point in the movie where the dog is going after his person and says, "Hold on, Penny!" Avery has adopted this phrase as her own and utters it with some true acting prowess. I need to get this on video because it's definitely a keeper (that sentence is somewhat amusing if you've seen Bolt ... Penny takes pictures and says, "That's a keeper!")

Third, Avery calls her friends Henry and Josie "He-ry, Josie!" However, she calls her friend Elise, "Friend Elise!" She then likes to talk about everyone in Elise's family, "Shell? Unc Jay? Baby No-wan? Baby No-wan crying!" With that last one, she makes her frown-y face. For those who haven't witnessed it, Avery has a very expressive face, particularly when it comes to showing her sad face. She has the traditional frown that goes straight into buckets o' tears. So when she shows empathy that Baby Nolan sometimes cries, it's quite endearing.

Not quite in line with an uttering, but worthy of blog documentation nonetheless, I present to you Avery's first official joke! Avery loves Michael Jackson. She can identify his music vs other music with a great deal of accuracy. One day, she was asking for "Michael Jackson" and followed it up with a very enunciated "owwwwww!" I decided that it would be funny to ask, "What does a cow say? What does a sheep say? What does Michael Jackson say?" We have done this for bank tellers and grocery checkout clerks. If their responses are any indication, Avery will be a very successful comedian.

Finally, Avery likes to announce she wants to "take a bath." While not a new phrase, I find the way she says this particular phrase to be oh so adorable. Maybe because she very clearly enunciates each word.

Brunch

Once a month, we have a brunch with friends who have toddlers around Avery's age.   Avery loves these brunches and talks about "friend Elise" and "Josie!" and "he-ry" (Henry) and "Alex-dra" (Alexandra).  She also can tell the difference between Baby Nolan and Baby Emmett, which I think is quite impressive.

Below are some pictures of Avery from today's brunch.

 

 

 

Happy Halloween!

This year was Avery's first real Halloween.  Last year we were in England, so she missed it.  Last year I think she was too young to appreciate the holiday anyway, so no big loss.  This year, she totally got into it.  By the end of our trick or treating excursion around the neighborhood, Avery had mastered the following phrases:

• "knock on door" (I would tell her to knock on the door and then wait so she'd repeat the instructions)
  
• "trick or please!" (I kept telling her to say, "trick or treat, please", but she would just leave off the treat ... I figure getting the "please" in there was more important than the "treat")
• "thank you" (upon receiving her candy)
• "happy halloween!"

I think Avery had just as much fun being at home when other kids arrived to trick or treat out our house as she did when we were out and about.  She would run to the door yelling, "Happy Halloween" or sometimes "Halloween Happy!"  Then when the door was opened, she'd clam up and just gawk at the kids in their costumes. 

I made her a helicopter costume, but we haven't actually put it on her yet.  I plan to do that tomorrow to snap some pictures.  The truth is that I didn't think the helicopter outfit was very practical given her age.  She'd have to balance the propellors on her head and the body isn't conducive to sitting.  Anyway, I ended up buying her a bee costume and she pulled off the bee look stunningly.  I would ask her what a bee said and she'd answer, "buzz, buzz, buzz!"

 

 

Long Overdue Post

It's been over a month since my last post - ahhhh!  Avery is growing and developing rapidly.  She talks all the time and can say four and five word sentences, but tends to still communicate mostly with 2-3 word sentences. Recently, she started adding words like take to her vocabulary: "take a bath" vs "bath."  She also likes to identify what everyone is doing or has done in whatever way she can: "Avery hat off.  Mommy hat off."  And the repeating is in full force.  Today, she was trying to say something about spiders, but I couldn't get what the other word was, so I said, "Something about spiders?" to my mom.  Avery the repeated, "something spiders."  I only mention this because I find it terrifying that she picks up on conversation bits - now I have to watch what I say MUCH more closely.  

At the moment, she's obsessed with bikes.  We actually tried to sit on a bike at REI the other day.  She did surprisingly well at staying on the bike (it, of course, had training wheels on it) and she even seemed to grasp that pedals make it go, but she didn't have the strength or height to actually push the pedals around. 

We'll soon be transitioning Avery out of her crib into a bed.  I admit I'm not looking forward to this.  Avery is a very good sleeper most of the time.  I fear a change in our routine will change her good sleeping habits. However, I also fear she's going to climb out of her crib soon.  I've noticed in the last week or two, she's climbing all sorts of things that she'd not even attempted before.  I'll turn around and there she is sitting on something or standing on something.  I think she's had the physical skills to do this sort of climbing for a while now, so I'm not sure if it was a physical thing that clicked, or if the desire to be more bold clicked, or if she just wants to be able to do things on her own now. 

I've been a terrible picture-taker lately.  I keep promising myself we'll get back into the groove and take more pictures and video, but it hasn't happened.  This isn't for a lack of activities.  We go on weekly outings to either the zoo or OMSI; we meet her friends at various food carts in Portland and then head to a nearby park to enjoy our food; we go on playdates to parks or the houses of friends. 

We've also gotten back into the daily dog walking habit.  Avery is now a whopping 27 lb.  I don't know what percentile that is (my guess is 50-75%), but I do know that it's HEAVY.  I had to buy a new backpack so she rides higher up, thereby putting the load on my hips rather than my back.  She likes her new perch, though was a bit dismayed when I had to change the rules of the walk such that she can't get down and walk herself.  If she's up for it, we drop the dogs off at home and then just she and I go on a short walk afterwards.  I just don't have the patience to wrangle two dogs and a dawdling an exploring toddler. When she's in the backpack, it's like I have a play-by-play of our walk: "Turtle go uphill.  Eddie go uphill.  Uh-oh Turtle!  Leaves.  Trees.  Eddie poop.  Avery hat off." 

In a month or so, we have a trip to Hawaii planned.  It'll be the last for a long while as it's only happening because our very good friends are getting married there.  This trip should be a lot more fun for Avery since she's actually aware of the beach and the water.  As an added bonus, there will be another little girl in the house in which we're staying.  She's five and lives in England.  I'm quite sure the age (and accent) difference won't matter to Avery.

Right now, my mom (aka Nain) is visiting.  My dad (aka Pop Pop) and his wife (aka Grandma Joy) arrived tonight, too.  Tomorrow, my brother and his wife (Uncle Collin and Aunt Denise) arrive with their son, Dylan (who is 6-months younger than Avery).  We'll have a full house, so Avery should have a blast. 

Pictures

A few pictures taken over the past couple of weeks ...

The stage of "mine" is officially upon us. Avery has been identifying what is whose for quite some time now ("Mommy's shirt" "Daddy's shoes"), but only within the past couple of days has she been consistently identifying what is hers using the words "mine" or "my" - she used to say "Avery's." Turns out, Avery owns a lot of stuff. Our living room carpet is hers as she informed Nain while they watched the guy clean it. She scrunched up her face and said "my carpet!"

Her counting is coming along, but it's all over the place, as any dignified toddler's should be. She's got one, two, three, four, five, six down pretty well. Sometimes she gets seven, eight, and nine. The shocker for me was when we were counting stairs as we descended them. I said, "thirteen," she said "fourteen", I said "fifteen," she said, "sixteen." I don't even normally count that high. It makes me worry I count aloud more often than I realize.