We have been having so much fun with our little Lillian. She is such a joy to have around and I love the little person she is becoming. Her sense of humor is developing brilliantly and she loves to make us smile. She is very smart and loves to be independent. She is quick to get hot under the collar but very quick to calm back down. I am learning how best to help her understand her feelings and express them in a more positive way than whining or flailing her limbs and crying. Every day she is becoming harder and harder to distract and she is remembering things long after I have hidden them.
One of the sweetest things she is doing right now is asking if things are ok. Whenever she drops anything, a book, a spoon, a purse, she’ll ask “are you ok???” and will continue to do so until she picks it up and will ask every time it happens. I just love seeing her concern over things because it shows her compassionate side. She is always very perceptive of our feelings and will ask why we are sad or if we are ok as well. She is also very concerned with where we are. If she is alone for too long she’ll come running through the apartment saying “what you doing, mommy?” or “where you going, mommy?”. As soon as we are located she’ll go back to whatever she was doing or sweetly come invade my personal space and climb right into my lap to be a part of whatever I am doing. She likes to tickle us and tries to surprise us by saying “boo”. She still hasn’t figured out though that she has to sneak up on us first in order to actually startle us ;). She is still doing great with her potty training and has been consistently telling me she has to go to the bathroom while we are out shopping or at the park. I couldn’t be more proud of my little girl.
Lil is so great with her bedtime routine. She has started to go to bed earlier will tell us when she is tired and that she’s ready for songs and prayers. She has even started saying prayers which is the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard. Randomly I’ll hear her say “thank you for this day, thank you for the food, etc…” and it makes me very happy. After we pray she’ll run to her bed and try to climb in and we’ll tuck her in and she’s good to go. We don’t have to stay in the room or do anything special. I can’t believe how she is growing up.
The morning is a whole other story. Lillian will one day hate me for writing this down but I can’t resist :). She’ll greet me with a hearty “Hi Mommy!” when I walk in the door and she’ll immediately say “I pooped!”, “I peed”, “That stinks!” or something else to tell me her diaper is full (which is mimicking what we usually say to her when we get near enough to smell her diaper). I’ll reach down to turn off her fan and she’ll say “Lily turn off the fan” and then she’ll turn it off, but she’ll never turn it off before we get there. Then I’ll get a big hug and we’ll get rid of her pull up and she’ll again say “That stinks” or “that’s a big one!”. I made the mistake of once having her smell a particularly nasty diaper and now she asks to smell them almost every time and then she’ll laugh with me. This process is repeated almost every morning :).
Last night we went to a choir concert for some of the girls we work with at church and Lil had a blast. She loved listening to the music and seeing the kids perform. As any 2 year old would, she started getting a little antsy and we let her roam around in between us for a bit. Her favorite group was the singing and dancing one right before intermission. She started off by following along with their arm movements and lifting her arms high into the air while on daddy’s lap. I could see her little hips shaking but when they started singing “School’s Out For Summer” by Alice Cooper and was begging to stand on the chair in between us and dance. We gave in and it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. She was doing her little version of head banging and was waving her arms in the air and shaking her hips. We had to work hard to contain our laughter and I was slightly concerned about her blocking the people behind us. Luckily we were in the last row before a big aisle so she wasn’t directly in front of anyone. Right when intermission started, some friends of ours who happened to be behind us came up and said Lily’s dancing was the best number of the evening and that she entertained the whole back left section of the audience. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much or had as much joy as I do from this little girl. Especially at this age some of the things she says or does are so funny and she makes me so happy.
