Libby learned the word "no" about a month ago. Surprisingly, it has not been the terrible, terrible thing parents have told me it would be. (So far!) It's actually just really cute. Probably because she always says it in a sing-song voice.

Just now, Libby was sitting in her backpack carrier in the living room. (Yep, just sitting in it. She loves this thing.) She started fussing and I thought she wanted to get out. I asked her "do you want down?" Her response: "Down? Noooo (sing-song)." It might not quite be a sentence, but she's combining words and it's adorable.

Going for a walk in the backpack carrier

She does say no sometimes when we try to put her pajamas on at night, but it's really no worse than the flailing of arms and legs we usually get as a response. Instead, I feel almost proud that she is grown up enough to express herself. It's almost like she's a real person now. :)

Humor

 

 My daughter is really funny sometimes, like when she closes her eyes and bats her arms around to feel for things as if she's blind. (I promise we haven't been teaching her to make fun of blindness - don't know where she got this from!) It thrills me that she has a sense of humor, and I can't wait to see the things she comes up with when she can string together more than 2 words.

Partly, she's funny because she likes to imitate us. We read lots of books that have pictures of food in them. Awhile back, I started pretending to pick up the food and feed it to the characters on the page. Libby picked this up right away and does it every time now. She will also feed it to me, to herself, and to her baby dolls. This little habit turned out to be key in avoiding a meltdown last week.

We went to Ikea to buy a TV stand and while we were outside waiting for Jared to pull the car around, Libby saw 2 ladies with ice cream cones. At first, Libby lunged toward them and started grunting to make her desire known. But a light bulb seemed to come on in her head and she switched gears. She reached out her hand and pretended to grab the ice cream between her 2 fingers and feed herself. Not only was it hilarious to see, but I was also incredibly impressed with her ability to soothe herself. 

Zoo Trip

Libby's playgroup took a field trip to the Peoria Zoo. (Have I mentioned Libby's playgroup? It's for babies 0-3 years and it's part of the public school system. We meet at the preschool once or twice a week and Libby gets to play with all the sweet toys I won't buy her because they take up too much room at home.)

Anyway, this was by far the smallest zoo I've ever been to, but it still had plenty to entertain Libby for a couple of hours. As a bonus, there was a park nearby with one of those huge wooden playgrounds, complete with a sandpit.  Libby was giddy with excitement. One of my many beefs with our small town (and our rural area in general) is that there aren't any cool parks or playgrounds around. We had to drive an hour and twenty minutes to get to this zoo and playground. Sigh.....

But back to the zoo. The weather was gorgeous that day. Serious blessing because it was raining and in the 40s the rest of the week and then, bam - 80 degrees and sunny on the day of our field trip. Beautiful!

Libby had a special moment with the meerkats...

Come Right Out and Say It

I never know how to phrase things when I have something important to say, so I'll just get it out. I'm pregnant. 14.5 weeks to be exact. Due October 18.

I kept telling myself I was going to wait to announce my pregnancy until I could express an appropriate level of enthusiasm. If I had mentioned anything about being pregnant in those first 3 months, it would have been "this sucks, I'm sick, it's never going to get better, blah, blah, blah." Now that the nausea is (mostly) over and I've regained some energy, I am feeling a bit more excited about being pregnant. I cannot wait until I get to feel the baby move...that's the most wonderful thing about being pregnant (well, that and getting a child out of it, I guess). But, I'm also feeling a bit unnerved about starting over. And this time, handling the sleepless days and nights with a toddler. So I'm pretty much in denial that it's going to happen.

What I can't deny anymore, however, is my belly. Barely even poking out, but for some reason, I'm wearing maternity pants already. Also just ordered 3 pairs of stretchy pants online. Apparently I want to be comfortable this time around.

 

I had the timer set on the camera to take this picture and Libby kept running into my shot. I went to crop her out and then suddenly felt so guilty for even thinking of cropping my precious child out of the picture! So here you, go. Me at 14 weeks, and Libby at 19 months old. 

Recipe: Ocean Water

Unfortunately, this post has nothing to do with Sonic's Ocean Water Slush, though now I'm kind of craving one. If only we had Sonic out here in the boonies. Moving on...

Libby loves to help me cook. Today, she came up with her very own recipe. I was busy washing dishes and had no idea she was "cooking" until she got my attention to inform me that the salt in the salt shaker was "all gone." The water bottle on the table was also a little less full. Looks like a fun experiment...

 But then she tasted it and realized that salt + water tastes like the ocean.

And P.S. - she just dumped out an entire box of macaroni while I was writing this. Guess we'll have to do some mystical magical macaroni art now (I watch too much Sesame Street).

One of those weeks

Whew. We just made it through one doozy of a week. Other than that awful, terrible, cursed MMR vaccine that made Libby sick and cranky for nearly a month, this past week was the most difficult of her second year of life (for me and her).

I noticed during her swim class on Monday that she wasn't quite herself - she was just unusually fussy and was shivering like crazy. That afternoon, I finally realized she had a fever. I called the doc just in case. They said not to worry; it's probably teething. That's what they always say. Anyway, her fever just got higher and higher, she had diarrhea, her eyes were glossed over, and by Tuesday night, I was pretty nervous. She was SO lethargic - I have never seen her like that. Wednesday, the fever started to go down and by Thursday, it was gone, but oh.boy. The crankiness. If I even looked at her the wrong way, she would collapse into a fit of hysteria. I'll admit, while she had a fever, I was much more sympathetic, but by the end of the week, I was just losing patience. I felt like I might break down at any moment. In search for a piece of sanity, I finally called to schedule an appointment for the massage Jared gifted me for Christmas. Selfishly, I went and got my massage on Jared's birthday (he should have been the one getting special treatment that day!), but I just had to.

Add to that stress my own general malaise, the thousands of miles between us and our family and friends, and a couple of big issues pressing on my mind and it made for one of those weeks when life feels just a little overwhelming.

Luckily, Sunday was a turning point. I heard some great counsel from our prophet:

Seek heavenly guidance one day at a time. Life by the yard is hard; by the inch it's a cinch. 

That was exactly the advice I needed to hear since most of the worry I was feeling had to do with the future. But today? I can handle today. It's just one day.

Monday morning, Libby woke up a different person. I couldn't be more grateful for her timing, since Jared is out of town all week and I could not face the idea of not having some relief in the evenings. We've actually had a very lovely past couple of days and I am so thankful.

And so no one gets the idea that our life is all doom and gloom, I leave you with a picture of Libby in her Rainbow Brite outfit.

18 months

Our stake president was visiting our branch last week and commented to me that church members get more excited about a child's 18 month birthday than their 1 year birthday. I'm beginning to understand why. Because holy cow, an 18 month old can be a lot of work. And to have a chance to drop her off at nursery so Jared and I can both teach our lessons in peace would be nothing short of heaven-sent. Alas, we have no nursery in our branch and will just have to continue with the status quo. Libby comes to class with me until she gets too distracting (she likes to climb up on the table, grab people's pens that they are writing with, etc.). I send her out the door and tell her to go to Dad. She goes to his class, where he lets her stand on a chair and draw on the chalkboard. This continues back and forth until church is over or one of us ends early. 

Of course, it's not Libby's fault. She just wants to be entertained, gosh darnit, and I don't blame her. I'm trying to find new and interesting things to do with her lately because I can tell she gets tired of the same old thing day after day. Recently, I let her help me with a Christmas craft I never finished. She LOVED painting, but it was a bit messy, so until I buy some washable paint, we're gonna have to put a hold on that. 

The artist she is, she loves drawing on herself. She's pretty good about not getting it on her clothes. She somehow knows to only draw on her skin, which is not hard to do when she's naked.

Libby's vocabulary is exploding and it's so awesome to be able to hear her speak and understand what she wants! Some of her words include: spoon, Elmo (she says which until yesterday she pronounced "uppo"), up (which she says to mean both up and down), milk, more, book, baby, eye, ear, boot, mine, hi, bye, mom, dad, yeah, bed, bread (sounds the same as bed, but we use our context clues). I'm sure there are more I'm not remembering right now.

She's so obsessed with yogurt, I have to limit her to 2 cups a day. Anytime the fridge is open, she darts inside and starts climbing the shelves till she find the yogurt. Or, she'll go the drawer where we keep utensils and will beg for a spoon, which means she wants to use it to eat yogurt. She also really likes to eat cereal and LOVES to share a bowl with me.

And since I'm sure I'll never get around to writing a post about our trip to Texas last month, I'll just throw this picture in here of me, Libby, and my grandparents at their house in Dallas in February.