The title of this post is a reference to Aria's favorite book over the last couple weeks, The Monster at the End of This Book, starring lovable furry old Grover. She has caught Grover-mania. She gets really excited reading it. She can recite lots of sentences from it and she knows what's coming on every page. Her favorite things to say are "You turned the PAAAAAGE!" and "Now... STOP TURNING PAGES!"
Her spoken language has really taken off in the past month. She is talking all the time now, knows probably a couple hundred words (? - hard to really know), and speaks in sentences up to seven or eight words - e.g. "Look at all the cars going by" and "Look at all the bubbles in the cup!"
So, lately her favorite activities, roughly in order of preference (subject to change without warning), are:
1. Talking (especially if she can say "NO" to something)
2. Swimming
3. Coloring
4. Reading Grover
5. Running around (best if naked)
6. Sharing cherries or strawberries
7. Anything with Nana
The weather has been so perfect for the past couple weeks. We've had some really memorable times outside. Barbecues in the backyard (garden burgers & corn on the cob!), wading in the inflatable kiddie pool, swimming in the big pool at Nana's, eating cherries we picked off the tree at Nana's, eating strawberries and tomatoes out of our veggie patch, and so on. What a life.
The big event of the past week is that we bought a big modular desk from Scandinavian Designs. Hosanna "the sensei" immediately went to work on putting it all together. Our house has looked like a desk parts factory for the past week. There were some fun moments over the weekend where I was downstairs in the kitchen cooking a lasagna while Hosanna was up with the power tools building furniture. We revel in our gender stereotype smashing!
The only other thing that I can say about this particular time in our lives is that I am bone tired. It is often a good tired, an "I earned this" tired. But it is still tired. I don't want to complain because I'm truly grateful for all the things we have, and I'm especially grateful for my two girls. But man, I'm beat, too. Every day of the week starts at 6:30 when I get up for work and ends at 9:00 when we get Aria to bed, and it seems like there is never any kind of break in between. It's truly exhausting.
By the way... about the potty. She has gone in it a couple times (including a poop) but it remains largely a novelty at this point. I'm not really eager to potty train, to be honest. It scares me. (bites fingernails)
She'll be 21 months old in a few days. Wow.
