At 2.5 Years…

At 2.5 years, she is the most fun she’s ever been. With more language come fewer tantrums and (a bit) more reasoning and understanding. It’s such a joy to watch her little wheels sort things out in her brain as we talk. Below are some of my favorite things she’s saying and doing right now:

I do my own self!

I love ____! It’s my favorite!

__________ is the best ever!

Silly mommy! Silly daddy! Silly Pepper!

When she hears a car engine roar, she yells, “Slow down!”

She says, “What’s that noise?” all the time.

I happy, Mommy!

She calls strawberries “strawbabies”

In the backseat, she tells me to go faster. If I tell her I can’t because of traffic, she says, “Go traffic, go!”

She loves to bargain, but she doesn’t have her number sense yet. If I tell her she has five more minutes, she says, “No, two minutes!” She also loves to ask for “one more” of whatever she is doing.

She talks a lot about the weather. “It’s sunny!” “Rain, rain, go away!”

If I get to daycare after 5pm to pick her up, she says, “Mommy late!”

Yesterday I sat down beside her to eat breakfast. She reached over, grabbed my hand, and said, “Best friends. Mommy and Izbef.” I cry every time I retell that and I am crying as I write it now. Below is the pic I took of us holding hands while we ate our breakfast together.

She loves to ride her blue balance bike and her red tricycle. She has made so much progress on both of them in just a few weeks.

She is doing great at potty training–we certainly still have to remind her, but she goes regularly with few accidents and loves feeling like a big girl. “Babies wear diapers. Big girls wear panties! I wear panties!”

At the pool, she mostly enjoys being in the baby pool with her toys, but she is getting braver at jumping in the big pool to us and going underwater. Going to the pool is one of her most favorite things–she asks to go every single day. Yesterday we got our suits on after I picked her up, but on the way there it started raining and she yelled at the rain to stop so that she could go swimming.

On June 10, we threw her a little Half-Birthday Party. She was over-the-moon excited about it! We rented a bouncy house, had cupcakes, and invited a few little girlfriends over for a morning party in our front yard. Having a December birthday is tough, and this was a fun way to celebrate outside. We had the bouncy house all weekend, which she loved, but they came and took it down on Sunday while she was napping. When she realized it was gone, she said, “Aww! I miss it so much!”

Now that it’s summer and I have a few weeks off, we have sweet, slow mornings together. I get her out of her crib when she wakes up and we cuddle in my bed and watch Peppa Pig. She reaches over and pats my cheek as we snuggle up together. I have to drop her off by 9am at daycare, but she begs to “stay with my mommy.” It’s so hard to balance being the mom I want to be for her and finishing my dissertation data analysis, a chore I must complete this summer to be able to graduate in December…three weeks after Baby Sister is born.