Brag book

So it's been a while since I last posted - mostly because I didn't want to sound like I was bragging about my budding young genius. But then I thought, it's my blog - I'm SUPPOSED to brag here!! This is for me to look back on in 40 years and remember the milestones of my kid's life, so here goes. At nearly 20 months old, Aurora can identify and say every capital letter of the alphabet, almost all the numbers, every color & shape, and she correctly identifies her left and right extremities 50% of the time :) She LOVES reading books - that's still her favorite thing to do, by far. She reads by herself, and she also brings books to you and climbs up in your lap saying "Read book! Read book!" And you can't just hold it and look at the pictures, either - "READ!" She tells you all the letters on everything she sees - tv commercials, other peoples' t-shirts, menus, billboards, everything. She talks a blue streak all day long - about anything and everything. She likes to point out ownership of different objects - "mommy's shoe", "daddy's glasses", "baby's yogurt".. she calls herself baby but she knows who Aurora is too. She loves Sesame Street and Curious George and she's getting pretty proficient at eating with utensils (when she chooses to eat AT ALL, which is another blog post entirely) She loves all kinds of music and dances all the time... this morning I was getting her yogurt out of the fridge and sang a little 'yo-gurt yo-gurt' ditty about it, and she said "DANCE!" and started wiggling her little butt so I had to keep making up the yogurt song as I went along. Oh and speaking of her little butt, it's actually a "hiney!" I have no idea where she got that - I'm assuming from her father, but he denies all knowledge of it. We're inching ever closer to potty training, too - yesterday she said "poopoo", "potty", and "RUN RUN!" but when we got there it was a false alarm. Once we get that figured out, my work is done, right?

Yep, she's pretty much grown.

The story of an obsession

It all started with a simple trip to San Diego's Wild Animal Park.
The baby elephant and all the giraffes roaming the grounds were so cool, a couple days later at the gift shop for the New Children's Museum we added one of each to our family.These figurines are so cute! And so lifelike! And not terribly expensive or anything!
"I'll have to keep my eye out for more!" I said. Luckily, I didn't have to wait long. Ducking into a little toy shop in Sea Port Village the next day, we found a whole display of all different species!
A neigh-neigh and a turtle joined the menagerie. Mike chuckled and noticed the vast differences in scale between the animals - the turtle is as big as a baby horse! The baby horse is bigger than a baby elephant! No matter - he liked them too. So after we got home and he happened to be at Toys R Us with Aurora one day, he decided to get a bunch more to add to the fray.He went in more of a domesticated direction, but that's ok.. at the rate this obsession is going, we'll have the entire animal kingdom in no time. Notice we even have a possum - how many kids do you know with a possum?? Not many. I really do like these animals - they are designed in Germany by Schleich and you can get them at toy stores and gift shops everywhere. They have adult males, adult females and babies of many different species. The best part is they range from $2-$7 each depending on scale, so it doesn't break the bank to pick up one or two every so often. Aurora likes them too - the pig was going around kissing everyone this morning. And just look how detailed they are:Right down to the eyelashes.

If you can't tell, we really haven't been doing anything blogworthy lately - Mike has had some time off so you know what he's been doing: Which leaves the rest of us to our own devices:But, the weather is starting to cool off incrementally, so hopefully soon we'll be able to go outside and do fun stuff more often!