Ode to our 2 year old

I've been calling Amelia a 2 year old for a few months now. Mostly based on her behavior! I once did not believe in the "terrible two's". Well I am here to tell you they exist. I just could not picture my sweet Amelia purposely wanting to cause mischief. She has always been SO easy going and even tempered. And then one day we saw the look in her eyes for the first time. You know the I-know-I'm-not-supposed-to-do-this-but-I-think-it'd-be-funny-if-I-did-it-anyway look. And that's when Miss Amelia turned into Queen of Mischief. She runs from us, she climbs all over me, kicking my face while I'm nursing, she colored on the wall (only once, thank goodness), she runs and wakes Maya up when she's napping, she throws her food, her gentle nu-uh turned into NO NO NO. She's straight out of a movie. And it has been challenging. Last week I cried every day, and then I went out and got 10 'how to raise a toddler' books from the library and now I'm regrouped and the books sit on the counter, untouched. Ha!

But she is just so dang cute! And the reason why I was able to regroup and calm down about my new lively and energetic Amelia is because of this, it is so easy to focus on the frustrating parts of her. But the reality is, there are WAY more positive things about Amelia at this age. And out of one day, I get frustrated 1 out of the 8 hours we are alone, cumulatively. That is nothing! So why do I spend all my time complaining about the few instances?

Here are some things we love about our girl:

• Her speech is quickly taking off. She repeats everything now! And is combining a lot of words to form sentences. She is still sticking to 1 syllable versions of every word possible (she wouldn't get that from me?) which makes it quite fun to decipher. But Juan and I get it most of the time
• She is particular about the funniest things. I got her 2 new bibs. She will not wear the flower bib. Only the animal bib with the monkey, and she always makes the monkey sound.
• She has to kiss Maya before nap and bedtime. If we forget, she will look around in a panic and run to find her.
• She is getting less picky! I have been cooking more often and more variety of foods, and she is actually eating what we put in front of her. She also recently decided to like PB sandwhiches, she prefers it open-faced on just 1 piece of bread.
• She has her books memorized. She can find any book I describe to her and then she will quickly identify everything on each page as I ask her to point to things. And she has a lot of books.
• She finally can answer the question, What is your name? Except she says her name as "Dia" (still working on getting her to pronounce L's). It's progress.
• She is very familiar with numbers 1-5, but doesn't quite have them down. She skips 3 and goes straight to 5, and always says it very excitedly, Five!
• She can sing along several letters to the alphabet song. F-L to be exact. And then Y and Z.
• She is finally starting to sing along to many songs, just the words that linger that she can keep up with. Her favorite song is still Moves Like Jagger.
• She laughs as she plays now. I was in the bathroom this morning and thought she was coughing, but no, she was loudly cracking it up over Woody and how he was almost falling off the ottoman. Love it.

Amelia's birthday was yesterday! 

The cake is a stick figure of Amelia. She recently became obsessed with drawing and asks me to draw stick figures of our family multiple times per day.

Here is her official attempt at a stick figure. I am so proud. This is the first drawing she has ever done that is not chaotic scribbles. And she draws it over and over.

We told her to smile. She is trying to force it.

She's reminding me of her cousin Judson in this one and his goofy smile. She really is trying to smile here.

She gracefully picked off all the frosting, then informed me she was Done.

Isn't Maya so irresistibly cute?

Andrea and Addy stopped in to say hello.

Steph gave her some play dough that she adores. So far she just rips off small pieces and sticks them on the window. I'm cool with that, easy clean up.

Her baby ball from Kasee and Jason.

All of our friends. All out to support Amelia. 

You may be noticing her little owie under her left nostril. Juan popped up to run to his phone, Amelia followed without his knowledge, and he accidentally knocked her into our dvd tower. Her 2nd bloody nose of her life (the first being when she fell off the bed at like 9 months old, that one was my bad.)

For her presents she got a Woody and Jessie doll. Yes we are spoiling her! I just couldn't decide. These are the most perfect dolls I have ever seen. Her other presents were a Book of Mormon board book and a Simba coloring book.

And when it reached 8:30 pm and we realized we had never fed our child dinner, Woody and Jessie just had to sit beside her. She will not go anywhere without them.

This video is of Amelia just being herself. Her smile really is the best smile in the world, even if it isn't captured in still pictures so well, haha.