I love my daughters spirit.  Her loving nature.  Her sense of adventure.  Her quirks.  She is one beautiful little girl.  Oh and did I tell you she is starting to read?  Well maybe.  I suppose it depends on how you define reading.  Word recognition?  We have this jar in our dining room filled with chocolate chip cookies.  And the jar just so happens to say COOKIES on it.  Cookies she knows.  She knows what ingredients go in them, what it looks like when I am making them, how to get them once they are baked and that if she quickly takes a big bite out of a stolen cookie and then offers mama the rest she might not get in as much trouble.  Right, back to the reading bit.  Lauren knows cookies.  We recently ordered her some new PJs (two pieces to make evening trips to the potty easier), from Amazon, but through a store called Cookies.  The boxes from numerous shipments were sitting next to the couch.  This isn't important.  Inside one of the boxes was the shipping invoice for the pajamas.  This is important.  Lauren was playing with said boxes, as you do at 2.5 years, and finds the invoice.  I look to see what she has and can see through the paper and it looks like a Costco invoice for something, but I am not too concerned about it.  Lauren is pretending to read the invoice.  Then stops pretending and says. "Cookie mommy."  Me, "No, you can't have a cookie."  Lauren, "Cookie, cookie, cookie."  Me, "No."  Lauren shows me the invoice and says, "Cookie."  Yes clear as day at the top of the invoice it says, "Cookies."  I tell her to show me where the cookie is.  She points right at the word and says, "Cookie." in her 'duh mom' voice.  She did this a few weeks back with the word 'School' and something else, but I brushed it off.  But now if we are reading a book and she sees the word cookie, she points right at it and says cookie.  Is that reading…I guess not really, but I am pretty proud of her.

Other recent beautiful things.  After nap yesterday as she often does, she came out and gave me a HUGE cuddly hug and a kiss.  I was holding her while standing and gave her a huge hug back and told her "I am going to miss when you are too big to pick up and hug like this."  She pulled back and looked at me, gave me another kiss and said, "Me too mommy."  Ahhh, melt your heart doesn't it?

We are still in a pushing phase, but getting better maybe?  She still pushes her brother over, but then sits him back up and hugs him and tells him its ok, and gives him a kiss.  She still gets in trouble for the pushing though.  She loves her little brother so very much.  She likes to hold his hand, and when he pulls her hair she takes his hand and rubs it on her own head and says, "Soft, baby.  Gentle, baby."  But never gets mad.

Just in the past two weeks she has had a language explosion.  It has been crazy, we went from being worried that she was delayed to being blown away by the new words phrases and expressions she has been using.  It is so funny how kids do things in spurts like that.

Our biggest problem at the moment, she loves to cook.  She knows how momma cook things.  She can get the fridges open.  She can get the flour and sugar open, she knows knives cut things.  We've had a few small accidents, but I know it is only a matter of time before there is a HUGE mess in the kitchen.  I like having a sous chef though.  She helps me count ingredients, stir, break eggs, grease pans.  She thinks it is great fun, which helps, most of the time.

Quirks?  She is full of them.  Soup must be smooth, not chunky, unless it has beans in it.  The immersion blender is my friend on that one.  Sandwiches still can't be assembled, the components must be separate.  Cheese is a food group.  Beans must be whole.  She will not eat meat unless it is in tube form (sausages, hot dogs, etc) but they have to still be in the tube, no cooked sausage mince or cut into rounds, and bacon, girl loves bacon, which so does her mom.

I could go on for days about my baby girl.  She is so amazing.  Every day I see her learning, growing and growing up, my daughter, my beautiful daughter.

Oh, ok so he is almost 7 months, but due to scheduling issues his 6 month appointment was slightly delayed.  All in all, he is doing really well.  He has a bit of eczema that Dr said to try the over the counter cortisone cream to see if that helped before going to the Rx version.  So far nothing else has.  It is the worst in his diaper region and gets really flared up when he has a dirty diaper, poor thing.  Dr's assessment is that he is really focusing on gross motor skills at the moment, and that he'll probably be crawling soon, and usually walking is 2 – 3 months after that, although she said the same thing about Lauren and she didn't walk until after she was 1, but Evan has more motivation in the name of Lauren.  We'll see.  He is just about crawling, he gets up on all fours, rocks, pulls his knees forward one by one until they catch up to his hands…and then pushes them back out and goes back into Cobra.

He is following his growth trend line beautifully, and they think he measured his head incorrectly at the last appointment as it spiked up, but it is now on the trend line again. So here are his official measurements:

Weight:  21lbs, 2oz 90th Percentile
Height:  28.875" 95th Percentile
Head:  45 cm 75th Percentile

At least he is proportionate right?  So yes, he is big, bigger than most, but not all!

He's healthy and happy!  Dr Beth said that his teeth were early but not abnormal.  She said he's super strong and if he shows interest in food (like mine) that we can totally start trying food!  Crazy I tell ya, but he does reach for my food every time I eat.  So looks like rice cereal here we come sooner than we thought.

One thing she noticed again was a heart murmur.  He had it at his last appointment, and she said that a lot of kiddos this age sound like they have them because of how well you can hear the heart, but since she noticed it two appointments in a row we'll be referred to a pediatric cardiologist to check out just to make sure it isn't something more serious.  We're not too worried about it at this point.

So his official off the chart measurements!
Weight:  18lbs, 5 oz – 92nd percentile
Height:  27 1/2 inches – Off the chart
Head:  44 cm – 75th percentile

We looked at his carseat and we'll have to move him into a carseat like Lauren's (but rear facing) soon, he's got an inch and two pounds before he is too big for it.  Makes sense he is really hard to carry in it!  I remember we were trying to wait until Lauren was 1 to swap her to hers but she didn't make it, I think it was 7 or 8 months.  He won't make it that long.