Sunday, November 8, 2009

Toddlers and falling leaves....

It's true my toddlers have spent much of the last couple weeks, testing my patience. We've been stripping off clothes during naps, taking off diapers at night, crawling out of cribs, figuring out how to unzip crib tents, going on hunger strikes and refusing to eat anything healthy, ripping pages out of books, throwing tantrums, making unruly demands and generally being misbehaving 2-year olds. But amidst the total pandemonium that is my house, I'm previewing glimmers of well-respecting young girls. Here are a few things that have made my heart hurt with pride recently.

  • When one of the girls sneezes, the other one says "God bless you, sissy."
  • I was told a long time ago, that consistent language is key when raising kiddos and I've come up with some mantras that come out of my mouth several times a day. Addy & Lilly have adopted some of these mantras and repeat whenever necessary. Addy reminds her sister "Don't forget peas and tank-ews" and Ms. Lilly has been caught telling the boy in her class, crying after drop-off, "Mommy's always come back."
  • When at the grocery the other day, the clerk coughed and Lilly told him to "cover his cough".
  • Addy asks for a lot of "one-mores". When daddy leaves in the morning for work, she'll get her hug and kiss and then follow him to the door for "one-more hug, peas, daddy" "one more kiss, peas, daddy".
  • They sing entire songs now, knowing most of the words to "Five Little Monkeys", "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "Old McDonald Had a Farm" and more.
  • We know our alphabet and can easily count to 10, they correctly count objects out and have surprised us recently memorizing the days of the week song and knowing that we have school Tuesday and school Thursday, they are learning shapes AND they know most colors but default frequently to "pink"...when all else fails, it's pink.

Thankfully we don't have a lot of leaves to rake, but I was loving some of the leaf pictures popping up on the blogosphere, so we headed out to a park close enough to us that we biked and took some festive fall pictures. Indiana is beautiful this time of year and I'm reminded why I LOVE living somewhere with four seasons. I'll look back to these pictures come February. Enjoy them!

Addy...."One, two, three....up"
Climbing the rock to get a view of ALL the leaves
Lilly....a bit scared at first, but diving in and playing peek-a-boo within minutes
Addy...charming the camera

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great blog,they are only two!! Fall is a wonderful time and it is so good to see the girls still enjoying being outside. Their manners really are impressive and they seem genuinely surprised by a sneeze from anybody but especially from themselves---they sort of look around as if to say what on earth was that??
ga ga ian

Jillian said...

Great idea on the field trip, there is nothing better than the smell of fall and a pile of leaves!

Your girls are so thoughtful and polite, you should definitely be proud and just block out everything else for now :)

Christina said...

They are so beautiful! I love that last picture of Addy in the leaves, I hope you frame it (although I'm sure you have dozens upon dozens of gorgeous pics of both of them). They're so sweet!