My big girl.

Riley is at an absolutely fantastic age, in my opinion.  I LOVE 20 month old Riley.  She's got a fantastic sense of humor.  She's incredibly smart.  She is talking SO much.  She's independent, she's cuddly, and she's the best big sister. She is full of energy and gets excited about the littlest things.  She's my little sidekick and I love it. There are SO many moments each day where I wish I could just freeze time and remember this stage forever.  I catch some of it on video, but it's just not the same. I want to remember every funny thing Riley says and does!

We have a mini trampoline at our house right now, and Riley is so funny with it.  She'll all of a sudden drop whatever she's doing and yell "jumping!" and run and hop on the trampoline and jump her little heart out.  Then she will stop, get all serious, and say, "show elmo jumping?  show panda jumping?" and hop off the trampoline and go get her favorite animal friends to show them her jumping.  And she can do some serious jumping these days, she'll even jump up and land on her butt and go flying in a fit of laughter.

She makes the funniest faces, especially when she's not too pleased with something I've said.  We call this her frowny face.  Followed up by precious little smiley faces, of course.

She loves to "have a taste" of whatever food we're having.  Especially if it's something deeee-lish.  And if it happens to be ice cream, she gets all excited, and rattles off sentences as fast as she can.  "Have a taste?"  "Hold it?"  "Ri-ri do it?" "Too cold!" "More chocolate, mommy?" and on and on...

She loves "helping" me all around the house... dishes, laundry, cooking, but best of all... baking.  Cookies, to be exact.  And holy cow what a mess, but we sure had lots of fun "measuring" and pouring and tasting during baby brother's massive 3 hour nap.

She loves art projects.  Well, sort of.  She does enjoy the actual painting/drawing/coloring, but currently what she loves even more?  Taking caps on and off her pens and her paints, matching the right color top to the bottom, lining up all the paint colors in a row, getting pens to balance standing up... basically anything other than actually doing artwork. :)

She has some weird quirks about the shower.  She doesn't mind when Mark takes a shower, but for some reason, she's extremely afraid of me taking a shower.  I don't know why, I've tried a lot of things to ease her fears, but she freaks out if I even mention taking a shower, much less actually get in it.  So in an effort to help ease her fears, I decided to try and introduce play time in the shower to her.  This was the scene for a good 30 minutes today:

She loved it.  Turned the water on low, stripped her down, handed her some tub crayons, and she was as happy as could be. Not sure that it will make a difference in regards to her fear of ME taking a shower, but we'll see.

i could go on for days and days about all the fun and silly and crazy and cute things she's doing.  I seriously have to stop myself when it comes to taking videos of her, because I find myself trying to catch everything on video.  Like, this video of her saying just a tiny fraction of words she knows could have easily been 30 minutes long (and it's still almost 6 minutes long...) 

She's been having a lot more ipad time with me nursing Jackson for hours during the day, and she loves the flashcard apps and know every single one of them!  And no I don't normally "quiz" her like I did in the video, but she had just run through them all on her own and of course I didn't have my camera, so I was desperately trying to get her to do it one more time for me.