I changed my name again

I am finally MOMMY!  Lilly always called me "mama" before, and I recently tried to get her to start saying Mommy and she would, but not consistently.  Finally on February 4th she started calling me Mommy all the time now!  It is music to my ears.  I would have thought the joy of hearing that would have worn off by now (almost 10 days later), but it hasn't.  I still love it...even when she is calling me over and over again at 6 a.m. ;-)

Here are some of our favorite games to play right now:

-We play "lions" by going to the front door or the back window and pretending that we see lions out there.  She takes my hand and walks back and forth, over and over again looking at the lions.  Sometimes we see monkeys too, but mostly just lions!

-We play "ball" by taking one of her bouncy balls and kicking it up and down the hallway while we chase it.  She loves it when I kick it up against a wall and it goes bouncing all over the place.  She also loves it when Maggie plays with us.

Lilly also loves putting our shoes on.  Here she is in Darren's slippers.

 I just love this girl, so much!!!  Look at how cute she is!

-Speaking of Maggie, Lilly also loves to play "rope" with Maggie.  We take one of Maggie's ropes, Lilly grabs my hand and we run to the front door while Maggie tries to get the rope from us.  Maggie loves it too and has been so great about being gentle with Lilly.  She sometimes gets a hold of the rope, and Lilly holds on as long as she can, so it's a good thing she holds my hand!

-My little rock star loves music and dancing.  We have dance parties a lot, and she loves to play her musical instruments.  She really loves her guitar that she got from Aunt Susan, Brianna, Nick and Anthony for Christmas.  Unfortunately for me (the camerawoman) what she loves more is my phone!  This is a weird video, but it's really funny to watch Lilly try to grab the phone from me.  

-We recently started playing hide and seek together.  Lilly likes to try to find me, but she hasn't quite gotten the hang of hiding.  Darren helps he and she will stay in a spot, but she usually makes noise (so far she only stayed quiet once).  The last time we told her to hide, she stood in the hall and put her hands over her eyes!  I love my silly little girl!

-I would be remiss to mention that one of Lilly's favorite activities at her babysitter's house is jumping on their mini indoor trampoline.  When we pick her up in the afternoon, she almost always runs over to show us how she jumps.  I have been looking on buy/sell/trade for a cheap one that I can get for her, though I think Darren would kill me!  He already feels like we have too many toys, especially big ones.  Our next house absolutely must have a playroom!

The other day when I took Lilly upstairs to get ready for bed, I put her on my back to carry her to her room when she was trying to run all over the place.  I told her it was a horsey ride.  Then this morning, she asked Darren for a horsey ride, so he got down on his hands and knees and let her ride on his back while I held her hands.  Then he put her up on his shoulders instead.  She was having a blast!  She bopped him in the head with her snack cup a few times and seemed like she was saying the word "saddle" although I am not sure since we have never said that word.  She may have learned it at Kalan's house yesterday, since both of Kalan's girls ride horses.  Regardless, it was adorable to watch and then I was glad to get in on the fun as well!

We had another snowstorm and although we didn't take Lilly out to play in the snow this time, we did take a walk once it started to warm up.  I mentioned her backpack and she started running around calling "backpack!  backpack!" so we figured we could take a walk.  Our neighbors made a snowman, so we borrowed it to commemorate this very crazy snowstorm.

 Lilly enjoyed Ana's birthday party yesterday and met a new friend.  Our former co-worker, Meghan, has a daughter about Lilly's age and they played really well together.  Both girls loved the Sesame Street toy and were very sweet to each other!

 Lilly has started to love peanut butter, although she doesn't eat it like a normal sandwich, she wants it open-faced so she can lick the peanut butter off the bread!  She calls it "butter."

Lilly wanted to put her hat on...all by herself ;o)

We have done some new things lately too!

-Recently Lilly has started "helping" in the kitchen.  She absolutely LOVES to help, and when I told her she could help me make eggs, she started yelling, "Yay!  Yay!" like she does when she is very excited.  We grabbed a chair from the dining room for her to stand on and she helped me to whisk the eggs.  Truthfully, she used the whisk more like a potato masher, but it was so cute to see her try to cook with me!  Now whenever I am doing anything in the kitchen, she goes to grab a chair from the dining room and starts dragging it in to come and help.  She even knows that she can't help with the oven because it's "hot".

We also took Lilly to a cultural performance at the theater.  There was a Russian dance group performing and Cindy said she thought Lilly would really enjoy it because it was all music and dancing.  The little girl sitting next to us was from Russia and she and Lilly bonded a little.  Lilly also loved clapping her hands along with the music and all of the colorful costumes.  Lilly actually sat through an hour before it was past her bedtime and she was ready to go home.

-We took out the play-doh the other day!  We have had it for a while, and I was originally going to wait until the weather was nicer to let her play with it outside, but I really wanted to see her play with it, so I figured, what the heck ;-)  She wasn't as into it as I thought she would be, but she liked smashing it around on her tray and crumbling it into little pieces.  Darren and I had fun watching her...and playing ourselves ;-)

Lilly's vocabulary amazes me every day!  She is identifying so many things on her own now and she repeats everything we say.  The other day we read a book with a hippo on the cover and when I asked her what it was, she didn't know.  So I told her it was a hippo.  She said hippo and we read the book.  Two days later when we were getting dressed in the morning, she was pointing to a book on the floor and saying "hippo" and sure enough, it was the hippo book.  My Nanny always loved hippos and it brought an unexpected wave of emotion when Lilly seemed so drawn to the hippo book, even though we had only read it once before and I only told her what a hippo was once.  I think an angel was watching us that morning :-)

I will never forget when we were sitting down to dinner and all of a sudden, Lilly starts saying....well, she started saying "fork" but at the time, it did NOT sound like fork!  She really can't make an "r" sound very well yet, so I think you can imagine what word we thought our 20 month old daughter was yelling at the dinner table...luckily she was just looking for her fork ;-)

My friend Jess bought us a book called "My Quotable Kid" a few months ago in anticipation of Lilly starting to talk.  I loved it then, and I love it even more now that I can start filling it!  Lilly's first quotable quote..."fok!"  ;-)