Lucy - 28 months

I was commenting to Ben the other day that although the tough times have been getting tougher with Lucy, the sweet times have been getting even sweeter. Lately this girl has been amazing me and in the same breath frustrating me beyond measure! I'm guessing this is the track we'll be on till she's 20+ years old.

 Some of the sweet moments - saying "I love you mommy" without me even having to say it first, repeating back Bible stories to us, singing, singing and more singing, calling Hank her best friend, saying "ok?" after everything she does (I'm going to take my clothes off, ok?... and trust me, this sentence usually happens every morning after she's been awake for about 30 minutes.  This girl is naked most of the time). 

 She still is an extremely sensitive little girl - she loves snuggling and we usually spend the first 15 minutes after she wakes in the morning or after nap time just cuddling together.  And we usually spend about an hour a day reading and cuddling, I would say reading in my lap is probably her favorite thing to do right now.  We usually go to the library once a week - this has been my favorite thing to do because it gives me a change up to reading the same stories over and over again!  When she is upset about something or not getting her way, she typically breaks down crying and needs a good snuggle in order to calm down - I've found when disciplining her, the best reaction for me to do is to sit, hug her and explain to her why I am upset, otherwise she will not calm down. 

 Right now for discipline we have been having her sit in time out for two minutes and then follow up with an apology and a hug. I would say most days she does not have to sit in time out, but we have days when it feels like all she is doing is going  in and out of time out.  Those days usually coincide with the days she is not sleeping well.  Those are the hard days! I would say most of the time she is in time out because she is not listening to Ben or I, or chooses it versus what we ask her to do.  I try not to use it often, and like I said we usually don't have to, but it does seem to be effective for disciplining her (right now anyway!). 

 As I mentioned the bad temperament weeks seem to coincide with the bad sleep weeks.  We seem to be going in cycles of 3-4 weeks at a time, Lucy will be sleeping really well and then suddenly it's like she forgets how to fall asleep and we go into a bad sleep period.  She started getting out of her bed more and more during naps and night time (before falling asleep) so we finally started locking her door to keep her in bed.  This didn't seem to upset her, and kept her in her room, so that solved our problem for the time being.  After a few nights of doing this, one night when I was tucking her in she asked "are you going to lock the door?" and I asked her if she wanted me to, she said no (of course) so I told her as long she stayed in her room I wouldn't lock it, and that worked! So now I don't lock the door unless she comes out of her room right away at the beginning.  We seem to currently be in a good sleep phase - I was just thinking that I had intended to get this post up last month and I would have had a totally different outlook because she was going through a bad sleep phase and was in rare form most days.  There were a couple when she had such bad tantrums that Ben started becoming concerned.  I reassured him that she was totally normal and that crazy behavior is actually what most toddlers are supposed to act like, we just don't typically see that from Lucy. 

 In terms of potty progress - I could probably write a separate post on how frustrated I am with her progress, but for now I will just update that she is pretty much in the same place that she was 2 months ago.  We are now 5 months into this whole potty thing and Lucy still continues to let a little bit out before telling me she has to go pee (I am constantly telling her that she needs to have "dry underware", but so far that has not clicked with her), she still has pee accidents, and just today she actually just was sitting right next to me and pooped on the floor... awesome.  She does not have accidents most days, but that's mostly because I make her go every hour.  I would not consider her potty trained at all, I would basically consider myself trained because I now know when I need to force her to go sit.  I'm pretty frustrated with this, but I'm not sure what else to do at this point. 

 On a more fun note, Lucy has been playing so well independently lately! I took a few pictures here - our neighbor gave us this play house they weren't using anymore and Lucy loves it.  I store in the closet most of the time and then whenever I need to get something done I just bring it out and she will literally play by herself for at least 30 minutes - talking and playing with all of the little dolls.  It's pretty adorable.

Here she said she was working on her email :)

I love watching her imagination come alive.  She is often talking with her dolls and to herself and will make up stories about what they are doing.  One day she set up a crib and bed for her duckie and said time to go to bed (I was watching this whole thing) and then she walked out of the room and reached her hand up towards the top of the doorway and said "I'm locking the door" and then closed it. (what's funny about this is we often check for the key before locking her door - I'm guessing she saw this motion and assumed it had something to do with locking the door).  Then she proceeded to walk in and out of the room because duckie kept movie and she kept having to tell him to go to sleep (ha! wonder where she learned that!).  It was absolutely adorable.

Other than that she continues to love coloring, playing with play dough, doing puzzles, and as of recently jumping on our trampoline (more pictures to come on that!) She also loves playing in the pool or bath... we spend a lot of time in the water.  And when I'm not reading to her, she loves sitting and looking through her books on her own.  She continues to talk up a storm and I am amazed at the words she picks up- today she pulled out some breast pads I had tucked away from when I was first nursing Hank and she said "these are humongous!"... I laughed, and then realized how cool it was that she used that word and used it in the right context. 

And now - a recent video I took one morning.  Please excuse the blue mouth - we were having blueberries for breakfast.  She started singing a veggie tale song one day and I just couldn't resist taping it.  There is nothing sweeter than hearing your baby girl sing "Praise be the Lord"!