Two-year-old

I can't believe she turned two yesterday! Or as Rachel would put it, "I'm-uh two!" Here's the lowdown on the birthday girl (probably more than many of you care to know, but her babybook paragraph space is too small on the two-year-old page, so I'm putting it down here.)
Rachel has been such a good girl. She was as mellow as could be until about 18 months, and now we are definitely seeing typical two-year-old behavior. But she has a lot more personality, too, so we won't complain.
Rachel isn't exactly a chatterbox, but she sure can say a lot when she feels like it. These past few months, she's been stringing words together to make the funniest little sentence fragments. She also likes to add an extra syllable to the end of a lot of words, so she sounds kind of Italian. (Example: "Let's-uh go-uh out-a-side-uh!")

She's done a pretty darn good job of learning her letters and colors these past several months, and she's just about mastered them all. When we ask her to count, she says, "one...two...free...eight...nine...ten...leven!" I don't know why Austin taught her "eleven", and I don't know why she just won't say the number four, but it's pretty funny. When she gets to "eight, nine, ten", she shouts it out really loud.

She loves: putting puzzles together, playing in the dirt, going down slides, swinging on the swings, reading books (especially nursery rhymes), looking at bugs, searching for spiders, any and every animal, throwing balls, smelling flowers, trains and airplanes, and occassionally will sit down to play with her baby dolls (but not for long.)

Her favorite thing in the world is the little girl Darby from the new episodes of Tiger and Pooh. I think Darby is a girl after Rachel's own heart, because she plays outside all day with her animal friends and wears a baseball cap. Rachel asks at least five times a day to "watch Darby". (I only let her once or twice.) She has also started to really like the new Tinker Bell movie lately, and I'm thrilled to see her so interested in something so"girly."

I decided to make her this pink pig cake. While I was making it, Rachel kept saying, "Eat pig cake!" and she tried to "blow it" before I even got the candles out. Too funny. We put up a little banner and we had a great party.

Most of Austin's family in town came to celebrate with us, and we had a houseful of about fifteen, so it was a successful day. Rachel had her crew of boy cousins to follow around the yard, and that was all she needed to be happy. We sure do love our sweet toddler girl and look forward to the years ahead.