Gracie Girl is 2 1/2 years old today. CRAZY! She really shows us her "big girl"-ness everyday. Given her recent growth spurt, she is physically able to do a lot more things than she could do before - such as getting in and out of her chair at the table by herself (which, you can imagine, does not help us on the eating front at all!) and doing a somersault (75% success rate). She can REACH a lot higher so we often find ourselves trying to figure out where she has hidden our stuff. She loves, loves, loves to jump on the trampoline and to climb, swing and slide at any playground she can get to. I think she is getting a lot more confident and physically active now that she has grown a bit. Grace is also doing great with her potty training. She only wears diapers for sleeping and has, on average, only one accident a day in her big-girl underwear. This is an achievement because she was doing great before we all got so sick, and then completely regressed, but has gotten right back to where she was in the last two weeks.
Her imagination is exploding - she does a lot of "pretend" with her toys and puts her "friends" in a variety of situations that she herself has been in (example: "Oh no, Mama. Doggie Doggie doesn't feel so good. He has to go see Dr. Nesbitt for some medicine."). She also is socializing her toys - having her Lego people play with her Fisher Price people's house and having her Fisher Price people play with her cars. She loves to do puzzles and lately especially likes to play the game "Memory", which we call "matches". She gets really excited when anyone makes a match - not just herself - and will sincerely congratulate us: "Great job, Far! You did it!" (with a big pat on his back). Additionally, she is really interested in the alphabet and counting. She can correctly identify many letters (A, B, G, H, L, M, N, and O - with about 90% accuracy) and when I read to her before bed she often wants me to spell out the words (you can imagine that I'm choosing really SHORT books these days). She loves to count things and will do so in both languages. Because language acquisition peaks at the age of 3 (for real), we know that the next half year is really critical for her Danish. We might need to get to Denmark soon for some full-immersion Danish.
Grace, as I know is true with all toddlers, says the cutest and darnedest things. Just a few examples:
- Last night I went out to dinner with my friends after the kids went to sleep - for the first time in over 8 months. I was getting ready while Grace was about to go to bed and she saw me dressed up and said, "Wow, Mama! You look so cute. I like those shoes!"
- Putting her in the car today after grocery shopping I told her, "Grace, you behaved so nicely in the store today. Thank you!" to which she replied, "You too, Mama! Great job! I'm very happy with you!" (Charles thought that was hysterical).
- At the playground the other day she kept saying "I'm a psychic!" instead of "I'm excited!"
- She has recently started calling Rose, "Rosie Rosie"...and there is no way to describe how cute it is when she calls her friend to play: "Rosie Rosie? Where are you?"
Grace is also growing into her role as big sister nicely. She likes to pile every single baby toy we have right in front of Noah so he has access to all and she encourages him when he is trying to crawl. She is still jealous sometimes, still acts out because of that jealousy sometimes, but she has more and more sweet big sister moments and nobody makes Noah laugh or smile the way she does.
Happy Half Birthday, Grace!
You really ARE amazing!
LMW
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