21-Month “Miss”-cellany

21 months is fun. I *heart* 21 months. My elder girl is so stinking funny at 21 months. She is getting into all sorts of new things, some good, some bad. She likes to climb anything she can. She’ll climb onto the counter from her Learning Tower. She tries to climb the cabinets. She climbs me. She climbs her dad. It’s not uncommon for me to turn my back for a second and turn back to find her balancing on something she just climbed up on. It’s a minor miracle she hasn’t climbed out of her crib yet (knock on wood).
She likes to carry and pack things. She had a blast carrying all her importants in a backpack at the farm last week.

She is still our outdoor girl. The girl loves to be outside and explore. She picks things up or gathers them together. She’s not afraid to get dirty.
She can say just about anything at this point and in full sentences, if not fully grammatically correct sentences. She says the funniest things sometimes, and almost always in the correct context. If I came to get her to take a nap when she was playing with her Baba (my husband’s mom) at the farm last week she would say, “Bye-bye Mommy. See you next time!” Today she was talking on her pretend phone and she said something like, “Hi Grandma. All done talking. Bye-bye, see you next time” (I think “see you next time” comes from the way her favorite show “Yo Gabba Gabba” always ends).
The other day she was doing something that was driving me nuts and I snapped at her a little, “Stop it!” Well, of course today I heard her saying “stop it!” with a little frown on her face. Made me feel like a big heel. I am very careful what I say around her so she doesn’t start copying even less savory words or phrases (which I admit I have been known to say on occasion 🙂 and wouldn’t you know the one time I did swear in front of her, I heard her mimicking “Dammit!” just a few seconds later. Fortunately I didn’t react and she only said it once.
She also has other funny little things she does and says like “I go cazy!!” when she’s dancing or “I yuuuv it!!” when she really likes something. She can sing her ABCs, count to 14 and knows all her colors and most of her shapes. She knows almost all of her letters by sight and can identify the sound each letter makes. It seems all of this stuff happened overnight too. One day she was my baby, and the next she was this funny little girl with some serious personality.
She has a little bit of sass in her too. In general she’s a very good girl and usually listens when I tell her to do something. Admittedly it sometimes takes me two or three repeats of an instruction, occasionally with a bit of hands on encouragement, before she listens, but most of the time she does what I ask fairly readily. Recently however she has started letting me know when she doesn’t like it by letting out a shrill scream while complying with my requests. It’s like she’s saying, “I’ll do it, but I’m not gonna like it!!” We have had a few tantrums and their frequency has increased a bit, but so far these are usually short lived. I must admit there are moments when I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing in terms of disciplining my toddler, but we seem to be doing okay so far. And I am learning all the time and figuring it out as I go, so I’m okay with that.
Miss loves to sit on the counter while I’m getting ready and play with my makeup or hair brush. I love watching her imitate me with my makeup brushes. She also loves to have her hair done. If I ask her if she’d like to get pigtails she gets very excited, and she loves to pick out the barrette she wears and her socks. One day we were in her closet as I was selecting what she would wear that day and I held up a shirt and asked her if she liked it. Her eyes got big and she said, “oooh, booful! (beautiful)” Of course that’s the shirt she wore that day. I can’t get enough of the pigtails. . .
She loves to push her baby dolls around in their stroller, but even more than that of course she loves for me to push her baby dolls around. “Mommy push?” she says. So I do. She also loves to chase and be chased, so we do this often with the stroller as well. The vacuum works too.
Miss loves to play with her sister and hold her. She asked to hold her the other day so I had her sit and placed Lass sitting up between her legs. Miss grinned ear to ear and held her and hugged and kissed her for a minute. Then she kind of pushed Lass away from herself and said, “Play toys?” So I thought she was done with her sister and wanted to go play with her toys. Well she walked over to Lass’s playmat and picked up some of Lass’s toys, looking back at me expectantly so I would put Lass down and Miss could play with her. She loves showing her sister things.
She is also starting to get interested in manipulating things and learning how things work. She pays very close attention when I show her how to get toys on and off the play mat hooks.
She is also getting into dressing herself. And undressing herself. She loves snaps and zippers and is very eager to do up the zipper of her jammies every night. Fortunately she hasn’t quite figured out how to undo the zipper. We had to abandon the few pairs of jammies she has with snaps, because I went in to check on her one night before I went to bed to find her jammies in a heap in her crib and her lying in bed with nothing but a onesie on. After she got up the next morning and I put her jammies back on her, I went to the laundry room for a minute and came back to find this.
Her near nakedness apparently inspired the urge to dance and go “cazy.”


And of course the jammies were a great tool for playing a sort of hide-and-seek/wander-around-without-looking game.
She is noticing the camera more and will look at it and say “picture!”
Sometimes now I can get her to stand still for a second and maybe actually pose for the camera. Here she even said, “cheese” for her Daddy.
Bottom line? I love this age. I have loved every stage, every age so far. But I. Love. This. Age. And man I love that girl.
Speaking of love, here’s a little sneak peak at a very-soon-to-be-three-month-old. I could just eat her up.

Fun on the Farm

We had a nice week at the farm. The girls were fantastic during the road trip, both ways. It’s a seven-hour trip without having to stop for feedings and diaper changes. With those it took us about 9 hours each way. We had a few moments of unhappiness, but overall the travel was great. My girls are road warriors.
We tried to be as prepared as possible, with as many of the comforts of home as we could bring in our huge vehicle (but not quite so huge when you remember we had two dogs in the back). Lass absolutely loves her swing, and it is a lifesaver for getting her to sleep at night. But it would have been very tricky to try to bring it along. Though my husband swore he would fit it in so we could have it, I managed to find a small travel swing at the last minute at our local Babies’R’Us. Literally, I was there last Saturday afternoon picking it up just hours before we hit the road. It wasn’t quite as good as the big swing, but she seemed to enjoy it pretty well.

So Lass spent the week swinging, and growing, and being adorable. She is such a good baby, she made it easy on me.

Miss had fun going outside with her Daddy and Baba. Here she is all ready to head out.

Over the weekend she got to see all of her cousins. Miss has nine boy cousins and two girl cousins in my husband’s family, so the play amongst the boys can sometimes get a bit loud and rowdy. They like to have my hubby be the “monster” and chase them around. This game comes complete with the scary monster noises from my hubby and screams of terror from the kids as they flee from him, so Miss was a bit overwhelmed and freaked out by it at first. She got really upset when the boys all ganged up on the monster and started jumping on and kicking my hubby. I kept telling her “It’s okay,” and she got to the point where she would run away from them while saying over and over “it’s okay, it’s okay” as she high-tailed it towards me to grab my legs and beg to be picked up. But she got over her fear and ended up having a great time.
They went on a few “treasure hunts” where the kids pile on the Ranger and ride around the farm searching for interesting things in nature. I have been on many of these and thoroughly enjoyed them myself, and I was kind of bummed that I didn’t get to go with Miss for her first one. But I know she had a great time. Here is what she found on her first treasure hunt.
I have never seen something like that before. Anyone know what the heck it is???
After she warmed up to them, Miss had lots of fun playing with her cousins of all ages. She had her 11- and 13-year-old boy cousins playing with her baby dolls and dancing with her and spinning her around so she could get dizzy and fall down. She played hide-and-go-seek with them too. She also learned some wrestling moves from one of her younger cousins a bit closer to her size.

She had to be reminded a few times about sharing.
The last night we were there, three of the small boys were taking a bath in one of the bathrooms and she wandered in there to see what was up. My sister-in-law who was bathing them asked her if she wanted to take a bath. Miss loves the bath, so she enthusiastically nodded her head. My sister-in-law started stripping her clothes off to put her in the bath and about the time she got to her diaper, Miss seemed to realize that my SIL intended to put her in the bathtub with the three boys. She quickly turned to me with a panicked look on her face and begged me to pick her up, saying and signing “All done! All done!!” I took her to the other bathroom for a solo bath 🙂
We had a good time, but as always, it’s so good to be home. Time for bed.