New Words and more

Kylie has made a big leap on her words this month.

Here's a quick review:
6 months: Momma
11 months: baby, hey, up, yea & bye
12 months: kitty (sounds like key)
14 months: banana
15 months: no, hi, belly button (beh-buh)

And this month, she's added: shoe, spoon (sounds like poo), ball, truck, dot, water (wa-wa), Bo (for her Gymbo doll) and "hoo-hoo" when she sees an owl.

It's just amazing!

And she might be trying to say "bling" which is kind of embarrassing. And of course, there is a story behind this. Kylie likes to play with children's headbands. I got her these back in the Spring and she just loves them. She's stretched them out tremendously but that just makes them more fun.
She puts them on her neck like a necklace:

And walks around with them. (don't worry; she always supervised with them).

And does other odd, assorted things with them.

Anyway, Karen and I somehow got started calling them "bling". I guess because she's so enamored of wearing them like necklaces or bracelets. So just the other day, she picked one up and clearly said "bing". Heaven help me! That's going to be fun to explain. I can hear it now, "Yes, one of Kylie's first 20 words was bling".

In other news, she's finally getting over the summer cold she had last week. She got soooo sick of us wiping her nose. In order to make it more fun, I started handing her a tissue and saying, "Can you wipe Mommy's nose?" And she would grab the tissue and rub it on my face. Then would say, "Can I wipe Kylie's nose?" and she would let me without too much of a struggle. And she'll grab the tissue and wipe her own nose. Plus, she's learning to blow when we ask her.


I also use the above technique in brushing Kylie's teeth. Kylie used to brush pretty well but lately she's just been sucking on the toothbrush and not really brushing anymore. So, I have an extra adult toothbrush that I hand to Kylie when she's in the bath. I'll ask her to brush my teeth. Then I'll present her toddler toothbrush and ask if I can brush her teeth. And we go back and forth. Then I hand her back her own toothbrush and ask her to finish brushing her own teeth. It's working pretty well.

Another change we've seen this month is that she really wants to help with her bathtime routine. When her bath is over, she wants to hand me the bath toys for me to put away. She wants to help dry her body and her hair with a towel. She grabs either her comb or brush to help brush her hair. And she wants a dot of lotion on her hands to rub into her legs. She's such a sweetie.

Here's a few more photos from the other day. Karen is distracting Kylie while I prepare the baby's dinner.

And when the fussy baby wants her dinner now, you've got to get creative.


Lastly, here are two scrapbook pages I completed over the weekend:

Details are here.

Details are here.

Walkin' Back and Forth

These pictures are so filled with love that they just slay me.

Several times a day, Kylie likes to play the "walk back and forth between mommies" game. Here's the pictorial story.
ON YOUR MARK....


GET SET AND GO!


Walking towards Mommy (still holding her arms up like she's holding onto our fingers as she walks)


Walking fast and getting TOO CLOSE.


Hugs and kisses from Mommy and then it is back to Momma.


Kylie flies in for a hug.


And a tender kiss.


And then a pose for the camera-crazy Mommy.


And then we do it again.
About 30 times.
And we all love every second of it.

Bliss.

Bed head

Girlfriend had some great bed hair this morning! (And if you look closely, you can see her new molar.)

How she plays

(Note: Kylie and I both have summer colds so this post will be brief.)

I was flipping through my scrapbook of Kylie the other day and realized that I didn't have many pictures of her playing. So I grabbed my trusty camera and in 30 minutes I snapped her....

playing on her music table


playing with a puzzle and making the delightful giraffe noises


sitting on the fireplace ledge is always fun.

I especially love that she sitting in the center of her circle car track.

Her musical dog still gets some play time and love each day.


And then she's off and shopping with her cart. She loves to fill her cart up and then empty it several times a day.


I'm going to try to do better at capturing pictures of Kylie at play so that I can document her life with pages like this one:

Details are here.

And my Mom told me that these were some of her favorite pictures from the set I just sent her so I decided to scrap a quick page of them.

Details are here.

PS- I took the above pictures of Kylie on Sunday 8/3 and it was chilly enough for her to wear long sleeves. Now it is 95+ outside. No wonder we are sick!

Busy Friday

Lots of pictures to share!

Kylie started the day by insisting on going for a walk. You may wonder what "insisting" looks like for a toddler. Well, she fusses and cries as she sits and points at the door. She refuses to be distracted. But when I pull out her shoes, she smiles and claps and bounces up and down.

I tried to explain to her that it was raining. But she didn't care. In fact, I think she enjoyed walking in the rain. I did have to restrain her from lapping water from a puddle but other than that, I let her play and walk and fall and walk some more. At one point, she stood still, threw her head back to the rain and spoke the most gentle and happy "Wheeeee". It was adorable.

Anyway, when we finished our walk, she looked like this:

Soaking wet & droopy pants from all the walking and falling but happy as a clam.

So, does anyone have a recommendation for a toddler raincoat and/or rainpants? I have a feeling we're going to be out a lot this Fall and Winter - and that means a lot of rain in the Pacific NW. I'm going to need something to keep her warm and dry.

Later in the day, we took to Kylie to get her hair cut:

She was very well behaved in the barber chair, even when we had to move her head around to get to her bottom curls. She did cling like crazy to the Dory figurine she was given.

And this was Miss Cutie Pie after her haircut.

She did other fun things last Friday like trying on my shoes.

And riding her Radio Flyer no-pedal tricycle.

But the big hit of the day (other than our rain walk) was drawing with a magna doodle. Here's Momma showing her how.

I've really been wanting Kylie to draw but she just doesn't get the drawing with crayons. But she loved this doodle. I think it will be a great way for her to grasp the concept of coloring.

Observant, clean and alien

When we take Kylie to the mall, she is keenly observant. You can practically hear the wheels whirring in her head.

After walking around the mall a bit, we took her to the little, mall play area. I gave her whispered instructions to not catch a cold or a virus. What does she do? She crawls over to the only place in the carpet that had a piece of embedded gum and proceeds to pick at it. That's my girl.

I did manage to lure her away and she played a bit on the various props. All the kids around her were much older and very rambunctious. I'm continually impressed with Kylie's ability to not get overwhelmed in situations where there are a lot of kids and noise. Even when one child started to play with her hair, and then another slightly pushed her away from a prop, Kylie just looks at them as if to say, "Hello fellow human child. You are quite an interesting creature".

I've started to call her my little scientist (and sometimes my little alien--she gets this "other-wordly" look about her when she stares at you).

Anyway, here are a few photos of the day.

Mommy helping her walk across a bridge so that she can slide down the other side.


Bouncy plastic flowers--fun! fun!


And a little bit of ice cream.


You might remember this picture from our April TN trip--still trying to catch up on scrapping all of those. I've just got two left to go!

Details are here.

WALKING!

At last! At last!

Kylie is walking!

Our cautious, 15 1/2 month-old girl is now taking steps. She took 8-10 steps all by herself several times today. We are ecstatic!

I must admit that it has been slightly worrisome to attend our weekly Gymboree classes and see almost all the babies start walking on their own at 12 months. For 3 months now, we've been saying to ourselves, "Maybe this week". And now, THIS is the week.

Each time she walked today I would stop breathing and just stare. I was afraid to hoop and hollar too much because I didn't want to startle her. But I sure did praise her every time.

Now, I know you're might be thinking, "Oh, you'll look back on those non-walking days with envy before you know it". You are probably right. But for now, I'm just so stinkin' happy and relieved.

I wasn't able to capture the walking on camera. But I did get this great "Standing Up" series.






I love the toe-curling, lip-biting Kylie action.

Let's see.....
A few more pictures.....
If you were to click on this zoomed in photo, you might be able to see one of Kylie's new upper teeth. It's on the right upper side in the photo.


Oh. And we got two new chairs today. We had to buy them because one of the cats peed on one of our matching set family room chairs. We got a good deal on these and they match our family room sofa very well. Here's Kylie playing peek-a-boo on one of them.


But the big news of the day is the WALKING! Hang in there sweet Kylie. It's only going to get easier and better.

Just stuff

This word art was created by Wordle/create. Just type in your blog address and you'll get back an image like this one. Be sure to play around with the rounded corners, different fonts and colors.

We had a pretty quiet weekend.

We saw the movie Wanted on Friday night. Pretty high body count on this one. I don't think I'll buy it on DVD--even though it has the lovely Angelina Jolie as the starring actress.

Karen spent some time building new shelves for our garage and cleaning it out. It looks so much better.

I started reading Victory of Eagles on my Kindle. I'm loving my Kindle by the way.

And I finished this scrapbook page. This was from Kylie's first zoo visit. I had this page almost completed back in June but I just hated it. So I started all over and ended up with this.

The creative process just fascinates me. Usually I'll have an idea in mind when I start a page but it rarely looks like that first mental picture when I finish. Watching a page evolve and trying new things is part of why I love to scrapbook. For me, it's so much more than capturing pictures and stories (which is awesome in itself). Anyway, details of the page are here.

Foot rattles

My foot-freaky girl has been intent on wearing her infant foot rattles for the past few days. They barely fit on her feet but she finds them totally amusing. Whenever one of them falls off, she'll crawl over to me and hold the sock out and her foot up. She's a strange little critter.

You can't see them in pictures yet but Kylie has finally cut two more teeth- one on the top and one on the bottom. And she has several more that look ready to cut any day. She's had only her four teeth since she was nine months old. Some more teeth will be a welcome change.

We just got her this mermaid washcloth that we keep wet and in the freezer. She likes it much better than the frozen teething rings.


Have a great weekend!

New "B's"

Baaa
For the second time this week, Kylie has seen a picture of a sheep and said, "baaaa".

EyeBrows
As Karen was playing with Kylie, she lifted her eyebrows up and down. This utterly fascinated the baby and she is intent on trying to move her own eyebrows around. Mostly, it just looks like her squinting.

Blowing Bubbles
Kylie has started leaning over in her bathtub at night and blowing bubbles into the water. She just spontaneously started doing this which sorta freaked me out. To my knowledge, she's never even seen someone stick their face in the water. I guess she just instinctively knew how to do it. She just leans over and blows. And when she sits up, she doesn't rub her eyes. She just blinks away the water and smiles. Amazing. I guess we'll soon be going to swim classes.

Banquet
Kylie has started stuffing her Elmo's mouth with Cheerios.
(picture captured with the iPhone in the car).


Lastly, here is the very simple scrapbook page I made of Kylie's recent wake-up photos.