26 months

Seems like she JUST turned two, how can she be 26 months already? She will be two and a half before I know it!

This past month has been full of all kinds of fun and exciting things.  Riley gets smarter and funnier and more talkative by the day.  The biggest development this past month has been the EXPLOSION in the number of songs and stories she has memorized.  She is constantly amazing me by singing song after song after song, then reading (from memory) dozens of stories, and even reciting a bunch of them without looking at the book.  She also ALWAYS knows if you skip a page while reading. :) I make up a new story for her before each nap/bedtime, and she retells them to me later on, and asks for specific stories that I've told her (her fave is currently the one about Mickey going to the zoo...)

For some reason, lately she is absolutely obsessed with the ABCs.  Looking at letters, sounding out letters, spelling things, doing ABC puzzles, singing ABC songs, etc..  she just loves it.  AND?  She can now sing the ABCs in spanish. Not perfectly, but it's the cutest thing in the world!  No, I take that back... her counting to ten in spanish is the cutest thing in the world.  Especially because she doesn't like to say "nueve" (9), so she goes "ocho" (8) "mocho" (her version of 9) and "diez" (10)... I'll have to get it on video. She also loves listening to spanish songs on youtube lately.

Favorite activities lately include: painting, reading books, puzzles, and jumping off of things, or jumping on to things.  Her favorite thing to do is "a kaboom crash," which basically means making a pile out of all the pillows in the house, and jumping onto it over and over and over again.  She literally hops around everywhere she goes... the girl is going to have some strong leg muscles!!

This past month she has started waking up at night again.  She typically wakes up around midnight, and comes into our bed for the rest of the night.  And to be honest, we really don't mind at all.  In fact, I like having her come in and snuggle with us.  And lucky for her, Jackson seems to be totally anti co-sleeping anyway these days, so he's never in our bed, so we don't have any issues there.

Now, let's talk about Riley's sleep.  Somehow, she has gotten back into the habit of needing me to lay with her to go to sleep for both her nap and bedtime.  And ONLY me, not Mark.  And we thought about trying to break her of the habit, but it was clear that it would involve a HUGE battle with lots of screaming, and it wasn't a battle I was/am willing to have at this point.  The thing is, it's not that she doesn't want to go to bed because she wants to play with toys or she's being "naughty," she just wants to snuggle and be comforted by her mama.  So all it really means is I make sure her nap time starts after Jackson is already in his bed so I can spend a little extra time snuggling her.  And then bedtime takes me a bit longer than normal every night since I lay with her and tell her stories and snuggle and tickle her until she falls asleep.  And when she wakes up, she runs straight into our room, and straight into my arms to snuggle, and she's back asleep within a minute. I must say, she is a  very cute little snuggle buddy. :)

Potty training has been going extremely well. In fact, not really potty "training" any more, as I think she's got it down pretty well.  She still sleeps in pull-ups, and I think we'll keep it that way for a while longer since she wakes up in the morning with a wet pull-up quite frequently.  She has had a few naps in underwear and she often keeps her pull-up dry for nap time, but not 100% of the time yet, and to be honest, I don't want to have to worry about washing sheets on a daily basis with all the other things going on in our lives at the moment.

Riley has decided that she loves cereal, especially muesli.  She also loves carrots, and was SO EXCITED to eat her baby carrots that she planted and grew in a pot in the backyard.  They were pretty small since she sort of, um, overplanted (a.k.a. dumped the whole bag of seeds into one pot), so there was a bit of overcrowding in the pot, but some of them came out a decent size, and she devoured them!  I love the idea of growing our own fruits and veggies, and she really enjoys it as well.  Riley has also decided that she now likes grapes again, after refusing to even put one in her mouth for the last 10 months, pretty much.  Toddlers are weird, I tell you.

This month Riley has really taken a huge interest in listening to music.  She loves to sing, but she is now obsessed with the toddler station we have on spotify.  She clicks around and listens to the songs she likes, and loves having the headphones in, and is happy to sit and listen.  She also has a whole bunch of CDs that she likes to listen to and sing along and dance.

She is also JUST now starting to get into the "not wanting to share" phase of her life.  She's starting to use the words MINE and MY_____ more frequently.  She will occasionally take toys off of Jackson, but she's learning that if she wants a toy that he has, she has to either wait until he's done, or offer him a new toy to trade.  Mostly she prefers to trade, as waiting is not really the easiest thing for a 2 year old!  For the most part, this seems to work.  The only time we really have issues is if he drools on one of her favorite toys or books, then she is not happy.  But again, pretty easily solved by me wiping it off, and then she's over it.  I can see we might have some issues once Jackson really gets mobile, so we're trying to set some sharing ground rules and expectations now so that we don't have as many problems in the future.

waiting for daddy to get home

This month Riley had her very first real fall, and I am still having nightmares over it.  I took her and Jackson to the playground, and Riley is usually very good on this playground.  She can climb up by herself, do all the things by herself, and she knows she can't just jump off the ledge and things like that.  Well, this time, I helped her climb up this one part that is a little tricky for her, and then I went around to meet her at the bottom of the slide.  A little boy climbed up right after her, and she was sort of in a trance watching him, and she started to scoot backwards without watching where she was going.  I saw this all happening, and the way the playground is set up, I couldn't actually get to her without going all the way around, so I started yelling to her while I was running around to try and get her to stop stepping back, but I couldn't get there in time and she fell backwards right off this huge ledge (it was one of those ones with the fire pole kind of thing for the big kids to go down) and she landed flat on the ground.  It was one of those falls that every other person at the playground went silent and stared while I scooped her up to make sure she was not seriously injured.  Which, she wasn't, but she was definitely hurt and shaken up, and she got a decent bruise on her back the following day.  I'm just so thankful she didn't get seriously injured.

Her imagination is also taking off... she likes to share her drinks and snacks with her little dolls because they get hungry and thirsty.  She puts them to sleep when they get tired.  She has full conversations with her little mickey, goofy, and donald duck figurines, and tells them stories.  She's pretty much just the cutest thing ever.

And I'll leave you with some funny things Riley has said over the past few days:

"That's just a boy... but, kind of looks like a girl..."
"You did a ooey gooey yucky poo poo... it's a baby poo poo!!" (she says of her rather small in size bowel movement)
"Oh no, can't find the other shoe!  Think mama put it in a box!" (since our house is currently covered in moving boxes)
"Mama I need the screwdrivers to go fix my bike!"
When we're in the car "Jack Jack!  We'll be home in just a few minutes okay?  Don't cry baby!"
"Oh oh mama, I think he's hungry.  Maybe he needs to feed some booby!"

Love that little bug.