Twenty-one months

Our little parrot is 21 months old now.  She’s a chatterbox these days.  Loves pretending to cook, playing with her dolls, singing, and taking baths. 

It’s difficult to get her to sit down to eat.  When we do eat, I usually have to wear a bib (by her request), and she’s constantly offering us her food.  Her favorite foods these days are strawberries, blueberries, and tomato soup.

We’ve had her out of her room lately, since we’ve had new drywall, and now paint, in an adjacent room, and she’s been a good sport about sleeping in a pack’n’play for the last few weeks.  Having the drywallers show up early every morning piqued her interest in “man”— every morning since, when I feed her breakfast I get a lot of “man goes bang bang bang” (as she pretends to hammer) or “beeess! beeesss! beeesss!” as she points her finger, pretending to drill.  Otherwise she’s been really into high-fiving and fist bumps lately, and with the wet and snowy weather we’ve been having lately she’s been very interested in wiping off the dog’s paws when he comes in from outside.

I haven’t had the camera out much lately, but here are a few pictures of Ashley from January 15th.

 

Cat scratch you!

Ashley plays with the cat, often resulting in scratches.  It’s not really the cat’s fault—she’s very tolerant—but Ashley can only grab her paws or dangle ribbon in front of her so much before the above happens.  After a scratching incident, it’s always the same refrain: “Cat scratch you!?  Bango did it!  It hurts!”  Then we kiss her scratched hand and she goes back and torments her some more.

Soup

Yesterday, for the first time, Ashley ate soup without making a crazy mess.  She celebrated with some fist bumps.

Stamping

Nancy bought Ashley a table and chairs at Ikea yesterday, and my mom had refurbished an old art smock that my aunt Jude had made for me when I was a little one, so today we put it all together and had Ashley do some stamping on her new table:

She loved it.  She initially wanted to remove the hat, but we just told her, “you need the hat on to do stamping,” and that seemed to satisfy her.

DC

Back at the end of November, Nancy had to go to DC for work for a couple days, so Ashley and I tagged along.

The first day, I just walked Ashley down to the National Mall and let her run around (or just stand and pose with her giraffe):

She loved running around the slopes and little steps of the World War II Memorial…

…watching helicopters fly by…	…and inspecting the plaques on the walls of the Memorial.

The next day was Ashley’s first trip to a zoo.  The National Zoo was perfect for her that day—it was empty as it was a relatively cool midweek day, so I occasionally could just let her run around.  Her favorite area was actually the kids' area with farm animals and a large pizza that she could climb around on.

(Above is Ashley staring at the goat below.)

That night after dinner we checked out the Christmas tree at the Ellipse.  Ashley loved wearing her Santa hat and sang the Raffi song, "Must Be Santa" as we pushed her around in her stroller.

It was a nice couple days and a great place to take a toddler.