Merry Christmas!

Twenty months

Ashley’s changed a lot in the last month.  She seems to have had a bit of a word explosion, and seems to know the noun for anything she regularly encounters.  A few favorite phrases now: - Careful [something].  We used to say “careful Ashley” whenever she was walking around Tyson to try to stop her from stepping on his tail.  Now she says “careful dog dog” whenever she walks around him.  She’ll also do it for “dada”, “mama”, “blanket”, etc.  She seems to have kind of missed the point of the word “careful” but at least she does tend to walk carefully when she’s telling others to be careful. - [Something] fell down.  Not always true, but she likes to say “tree fell down”, “fork fell down”, or whatever. - [Something] come off.  Usually talking about her boots, and either means that she wants them off, or they fell off. She has a clear favorite song-- “Must be Santa” by Raffi.  She asks to hear it by pointing at the DVD player and saying “Santa”.  And she’ll sing lines from it on her own spontaneously.  Her current favorite overall album is “A Duck in New York City” by Connie Kaldor though.

Almost every object around the house is categorized as being either “Mama’s” or “Dada’s”.  Mama’s purse, juice, hat, phone, boots, garbage.  Dada’s vacuum, camera, shoes, coffee, tea. 

She seems to have a pretty good idea of whatever we’re talking about.  If Nancy and I discuss what we want to have for dinner, for example, she’ll almost always pipe up with a suggestion (usually cheese).  The other day Nancy was ordering a pizza.  She asked for a large with sausage and mushrooms and Ashley added, “cheese!” 

She’s had at least two new teeth come in this past month.  Upper and lower, right side of her mouth, teeth between the front and first molars are starting to come in.  That makes 14.

It’s been a rough month for sleeping with the teething and a couple of colds.  She’s spent a lot of time in our bed, but we trying to put an end to that.  We’ve been visiting her in her room and reading her stories the last couple nights, instead of letting her go to our bed.  It’s been surprising to us how quickly she seems to be catching on to what’s going on.  She adapts by saying different things (like calling for the dog instead of either of us!) or changing the pace or path of her run to the door after we put her back in her crib.

The next update will be her trip to DC a couple weeks ago.

Christmas card portrait fail

On Thanksgiving weekend, our yard was still full of leaves, so we decided it might make a nice setting to attempt to take a family portrait, so we could maybe send out a Christmas card for once.

I set up the tripod, we put a Santa hat on Ashley, and and took some test shots… things were looking promising.

Next I got in the frame and we took a whole bunch of photos.  Well, they were all the same… just likes this:

Ashley is a cheerful kid and smiles all the time… except when you need her to.  We couldn’t do anything to get her to smile.

So maybe next year.  On the plus side, Ashley had a good time playing with the leaves and the tripod.

Christmas tree

Also on Thanksgiving we set up our (fake) Christmas tree.  Or, at least, Nancy and Ashley set it up, while I took pictures.

Ashley seemed quite impressed that the tree on the box looked so similar to the assembled tree.

A quick kiss for mommy:

And a kiss for the mouse ornament:

Cat whisperer

On Thanksgiving day we went to the little farm nearby, where Ashley likes to look at the animals.  She mostly just stares quietly at length, as shown above, and then quickly runs over to a new animal to look at.  Anyway, we were about to leave and a certain little animal caught Ashley’s eye:

She managed to pet the cat for quite a while without ever really scaring it away.  We were quite impressed!