2 years old!

This month little miss Vivi turned two!  She had a great birthday party with our families, some chocolate cake and lots of presents.

This month's cutest new phrase has to be "What's this thing?"  She has been saying "What's this?" for quite some time, but there is something extra adorable about the way that she says "thing" that gets me every time!  I make her repeat it sometimes because I love it so much!  She is stringing together longer sentences now; it's common to hear 5-6 word sentences.  She is also still into touching our faces when she really wants us to listen to what she is saying, which is the sweetest feeling in the world.

She is just as active as ever, in fact becoming more and more active as time goes on.  She runs, jumps, climbs and hops everywhere.  One of her favorite parts of the day is getting ready for bed, because after she and Ryder are cleaned up and changed, they jump on his bed for a few minets before going to sleep.   She is into jumping as high as she possibly can- she gets some good height for a two-year-old!  She loves to be outside, even more so than Ryder.  She constantly asks to go for walks and go play in the yard.

Vivien has really learned how to get Ryder's goat lately.  Frankly after the past two years, he deserves it a bit!  One day he left his cereal on the table and when he was ignoring it, Vivien ate it.  Later when he decided that he wanted to finish it, he found the bowl empty.  He was shouting about what happened to his cereal and Vivi told him "I ate it all"!!!  She also likes to snag things that she knows he's using and then run over and hide behind me when he gets mad.  Luckily they play well together at other times and are often very sweet to each other!

I've been holding out a bit, but Vivi is ready to move up to a new clothing size, which always makes me sad!  She has been eating a lot lately, so I think that she might be hitting a nit of a growth spurt.  All of a sudden she definitely seems a bit bigger/taller to me!

She is still so smiley!

That was the best pic I could get with her birthday banner 

Such a serious face!

Busy helping!

Happy girl!

Just reading some Christmas cards under the tree

44 months!

Ryder is simultaneously a sweet and helpful boy and a grumpy, never-satisfied three year old.  I guess that's the way of things!  He is usually a huge help around here but every so often he is in a rotten and grumpy mood without explanantion.  It must be hard to be a toddler!

Ryder is a mile-a-minute talker now, especially when he's excited.  One of the cute things that he has been saying lately is "I have an excellent idea!" while holding up one finger in the air.  I don't know what the finger is for but it is adorable.

Ryder loves numbers and counting.  He counts everything, all the time.  He has been working out how 2 and 3 digit numbers work for a while now.  He'll say "What's a 7 and a 1?"  And then he answers "17!" He knows the numbers solidly up to thirty and he knows the tens up to 100, but the funniest thing is when he doesn't know what's next, so he thinks of the numbers that he does know to make up a number that he thinks could be next.  I love eleventeen and tenty (instead of 100)- as a linguist I love to hear made up words like that!  He has also been working on telling time, since there are numbers involved and he loves numbers.  He's getting pretty good at telling digital time, especially up to the half hour mark.

We took the kids out on a couple of nature walks nearby and Ryder loves to climb rocks.  He started this summer especially when we went to the White Mountains and now he does it everywhere.  Every single big rock that we go by, Ryder runs ahead and climbs up.  Occasionally he needs help on the big ones, but he loves climbing.

Ryder is also super excited that it's getting to be Christmas time.  Before Thanksgiving we went into Michaels to get something and they had all of their Christmas supplies out.  Ryder was in heaven, he ran around the store, stopping by each new thing, jumping up and down and yelling "Wow!"  It was the cutest thing I've ever seen- I wish that I had videotaped it.

It's all acrobatics all the time, lately

I suspect that mischief was about to happen

Just chillin!

23 months!

Every month I type in a new age and am amazed and horrified by how big my kids are getting and this month is no different!  How is Vivien almost 2?  I really don't know!

Vivien is talking so much now.  She makes tons of short 3-4 word sentences about whatever is going on or whatever she needs.  Her new favorite this past month was "Get it NOW."  When she wants us to do something, she grabs our arm and pulls hard while saying "Come on!"  This month she has also been singing songs and theme songs to her favorite shows.  She loves Heigh Ho the Dairy-O and the Bob the Builder and Thomas theme songs.  It's super cute to hear her singing!

Vivien learned how to climb over the gate at the bottom of our stairs this month, from watching Ryder do it all the time I'm sure!  Rather than have her precariously climbing over the gate, we took it down.  Now going up and down the stairs is her favorite thing.  It's amazing how much things are more fun when done on the stairs, such as eating or drinking milk.

Now that she's a little older, Vivien loves to play with more of the toys.  Play-doh is her new favorite.  She and Ryder can sit at the table for at least a half an hour cutting it all up and smooshing it together.  She loves to do markers and stickers too, but mostly the marker seems to end up on her.  And black is her favorite color, so it's a bit of a pain to get off!

Our little independent girl loves to dress herself and she definitely has her own ideas on what she wants to wear.  It's not hard to get her to get dressed in the am before school, but other times of day she wants to pick out her clothes and change them.  She has a certain favorite pair of pants and whenever she sees them, off her current pants go and those purple fleece ones go on!  She feels the same way about shoes- her preference is flip-flops, so she only gets to wear those in the house at this time of year!

No socks = happy Vivi

Cutie pie

Playing hide and seek

She loves the stairs

Getting tickled by Ryder

She's so big!